RSS Feed Autodiscovery
The most common problem people have submitting their blog to our system is not having a proper RSS feed.. The TopOfBlogs crawler will verify several things in order to ensure that you are submitting a blog and not a regular site and having a proper rss feed is just a basic thing for any type of blogging platform. Still, even if your blog has a feed and it is included somewhere on the front page, it might be very hard for our crawler to find it.
In order for our system, or any aggregator (also applies to your visitors clickig on the RSS icon in their browser’s URL field) to crawl your site you should ensure that you are advertising your feed. For this you just need to have in your head section of your HTML page (blog template) a line like:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="/feed/" />
(where obviously you will have your own feed url), or depending on your feed type, for atom:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="/feed/atom/" />
If you have multiple feeds you can just specify multiple lines.
These links will enable RSS autodiscovery and it will allow browsers and aggregators to automatically detect your rss feed, and make it easier to subscribe in general.
Conclusion: if your submission to TopOfBlogs is failing be sure to check that you make your blog feed discoverable to our robot and other systems to help you get a better exposure for your blog.
Ninah
May 7th, 2009 at 12:29 am #
thank you very much for your very prompt customer support. my problem was solved because i was sent a link to this article. i am impressed with your response time.