October 23, 2008 — TopOfBlogs.com recently marked its one-year anniversary and newly launched their Official Feedback Forum. The User Voice Forum enables users to submit ideas and vote on ideas submitted by other users. With more than 8,000 registered blogs, TopOfBlogs.com is one of the fastest growing toplist directories.

“TopOfBlogs.com has had an active user community from the inception. Many of the new features are a direct result of early user feedback. The Official Feedback Forum was a natural extension of our relationship with our users,” said Founder and CEO, Marius Ducea. “The Feedback Forum not only allows us to capture the ideas of our community but truly allows everyone to take part in shaping the site’s growth and prioritizing the most important features.”

TopOfBlogs.com represents 130 countries and more than 40 languages. The site tracks on average 2 million page views per day and sent out over 280,000 clicks to member blogs.
Since the launch of the Feedback Forum users have suggested a number of ideas including random display of user websites, adding more badges, and expanding the site in other languages. Ducea commented, “We have received so many great ideas and it is the enthusiasm of our community that energizes our team to keep growing the site and enhancing the experience for our members.”

TopOfBlogs.com maintains a search engine and family friendly site. Registration is free and all blogs are manually reviewed for acceptance. The feedback forum is located at http://feedback.topofblogs.com/

Send us your suggestions and your blog could be featured on the homepage for a whole month! During the next 3 months, until the end of the year, we will monthly award the user that had the best suggestion – ranked by the number of votes – and feature their blog on our homepage for one month.

Thank you for being a part of our community and we are looking forward to your suggestions,
- TopOfBlogs Team
Vote for new features at http://feedback.topofblogs.com/

October 14, 2008 — TopOfBlogs marks its one-year anniversary and validates that now more than ever people are turning to online sites for business, information and entertainment. TopOfBlogs.com is one of the fastest growing toplist directories with more than 8,000 registered blogs, representing 130 countries and more than 40 languages. The site tracks on average 2 million page views per day and sent out over 280,000 clicks to member blogs. The site continues to add features, including the newly launched Official Feedback Forum.

“The growth of TopOfBlogs.com reflects the value of online marketing and branding. Companies and individuals are using blogs to attract and interact with their customer base, “said Founder and CEO, Marius Ducea. “In the current economic climate, blogging is a low cost and efficient way to maximize your marketing ROI. Additionally, many are finding the value of creating communities through the medium of blogging.”

Not content to blow out the candles and rest on its accomplishments, TopOfBlogs.com has launched an official feedback forum. “We are so thankful to our members for helping us grow and improve in our first year. We have received and implemented many of their suggestions so this forum is an extension of our commitment to listen to our members,” offered Ducea. The feedback forum is located at http://feedback.topofblogs.com/

TopOfBlogs.com is scheduled to launch its next release before year-end. The new release will include the introduction of badges and widgets and many other cool new features.

TopOfBlogs maintains a search engine and family friendly site. Registration is free and all blogs are manually reviewed for acceptance. Registered blogs are ranked on various criteria allowing visitors to search the best blogs by category, tag, country, or language.
The myriad of features include:

• Blog only directory. The site does not allow static websites.
• Manual approval of all blogs to ensure the directory features only high quality sites.
• The site is SEO friendly. Clean URLs enable easy discovery by search engines.
• Advanced security that prevents measures used to cheat existing ranking systems.
• A wide range of sorting options. Visitors can view blogs globally, by category or tag, filter by country or language, or number of feed readers.
• Visitors can select various time options, from the default ‘now’ to yesterday, past week, past month, or all time.
• Thumbnails provide a quick glance on the actual blog.
• Tracking of external metrics such as Google PageRank, number of feed readers, Alexa and Technorati rankings.
• Blog owners have full control of their account and blogs.

TopOfBlogs.com began with a mission to become the best toplist directory for blogs by rewarding site users with valuable traffic. The team is well on its way to fulfilling that mission.

June 4, 2008 — With more than 100 million blogs on the internet, fast growing blog directory TopOfBlogs.com offers blog owners an easy way to gain visibility and traffic.

TopOfBlogs.com, already features more than 4,000 blogs and is tracking more than 1 million blog page views every day. The site, designed to be search engine friendly enabling easy discovery of blogs has already sent out 140,000 clicks to member blogs.

Registration is free. Registered blogs are ranked on various criteria allowing visitors to search the best blogs by category, tag, country, or language. TopOfBlogs also tracks external metrics such as Google PageRank, number of feed readers, Alexa and Technorati rankings. The wide range of options enables blog owners to compare their rankings against others in the same niche, and blog readers a wide range of search options.

The team at TopOfBlogs is committed to creating a site that is beneficial for blog owners and readers. The myriad of features include:

• Blog only directory. The site does not allow static websites.
• Manual approval of all blogs to ensure the directory features only high quality sites.
• The site is SEO friendly. Clean URLs enable easy discovery by search engines.
• Advanced security that prevents measures used to cheat existing ranking systems.
• A wide range of sorting options. Visitors can view blogs globally, by category or tag, filter by country or language, or number of feed readers.
• Visitors can select various time ranges, from the default ‘now’ to yesterday, past week, past month, or all time.
• Thumbnails provide a quick glance on the actual blog.
• Blog owners have full control of their account and blogs.

TopOfBlogs aims to become the best toplist directory for blogs by rewarding site users with valuable traffic. The team is equally focused on becoming the go-to site for blog readers by offering an easy method to find the best blogs in a wide range of categories.

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.

• Pageviews
• Feedcount
• Google PageRank
• Alexa
• Technorati
• Sent Out

and of course on all these, you can apply the Country or Language filters.

As always your feedback is welcomed, so feel free to send us your suggestions, ideas, bug reports, or comments at any time.

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.

This being said, we are forced to introduce the manual verification step, and starting today all blogs will be verified by our editors. If one blog is found to be outside our terms of service, it will be suspend and completely ignore any other submissions for that particular blog url. While if the blog is accepted the user will receive the email notification and can start using our system right away.
Even though he have a high number of daily submissions we are trying to process every submission in maximum two business days (normally this is much shorter – like a couple of hours).

For bloggers the process should be the same as before. Our crawler tries to do its best and make it as easy as possible to submit your blog. If you are confident that your blog is ’safe’ and not breaking any of our terms of services you can even add you tracking code immediately. If you have any concerns, we would suggest you to wait for the email notification (sent only on accepted blogs).

This action should ensure that only quality blogs are accepted in our toplist directory and this should be beneficial for both bloggers and also the general users browsing our site.

We have launched this new feature, that is quite unique amongst similar sites to our knowledge, in order for our members to be able to choose their preferred method:

• if you prefer you can show the image that is presenting your current rank inside your main category. This will visualy show your visitators the rank your blog has among other similar blogs in the same niche.
• while if you prefer, you can now hide this image, and still benefit from tracking your blog correctly. This was done for people that didn’t wanted a new graphic design to mess with their blog layout, or just prefer to not show the rank they have on their blogs.

You can now use the top search box to find blogs, based on their name, description, or tags inside the whole directory. The results are sorted by the general rankings, meaning you will always see the ‘best’ blogs first.

If you have any suggestions for us, please use the contact form, and, as you can see we are working to implement all of your good ideas, to bring TopOfBlogs one step closer to our goal: to become the best top of blogs directory.