TopOfBlogs Official Blog

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.

As many of you have noticed already we have rolled out a cool new feature: feedcount. Since many people are reading blogs using a rss reader, comparing blogs only on pageviews is not at all accurate. So we added to our system another metric starting today, and this is the feedcount. It works for any feedburner feed that has the awareness api public (the default) and we update this value daily (as provided by feedburner) .

This value is added to the pageviews and counts in our global ranking. For blogs that don’t have a feedburner feed we are unable to get this metric and we would really suggest that you get your rss feed from feedburner.  It is free and has many other cool features.

Note: if you want to change your existing feed on your topofblogs listing you can do this from your account (using any of the automatically advertised feeds on your blog).

I hope you will enjoy this new feature and we are looking forward for your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve topofblogs even more.