Alltop.com Profile

What is Alltop.com? Alltop is a combination blog search engine and blog/headline aggregator. Its popular and works better than you might think.

This popular tool by internet master Guy Kawasaki is easy to submit to, however getting listed can be a little tougher. The one page submission form allows you to request which section to be listed on, and both your URL and RSS feed. Within a week, they'll advise of acceptance or refusal. If accepted, your blog is opened to a huge audience.

Class of tool: Blog Search Engine with a headline aggregator

Other blog search engines: View the definitive list.

From Alltop.com: The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph.

Cost: Free

What makes it different? Two main things:

1. It is becoming the authority in sorting through the flood of blog posts and articles that are published daily.
2. It offers a personalized aggregation page (http://my.alltop.com/) where you can build the feeds, headlines and blogs that interest you. And its free, of course.

Popularity: Alexa site ranking: 2,884 (worldwide traffic rank) with 4,207 sites linking in.

Who is using? Every significant (and many not so significant) blogger because headlines are picked up automatically by Alltop.

Ease of use: It is very simple navigation. Blog submission process is equally straight forward.

Time to setup: Two minutes should do it, three if you need to find your RSS feed address.Submissions are fast and painless.

Time to maintain: No maintenance required.

What you need to know: Not all blogs are accepted. They evaluate each submission individually. Splogs are rejected so don't both submitting these.

Bottom line: A great tool to open your blog up to a new group of readers. Also, their personalized page is great – it's kind of like a twitter feed (without spam) and all on one page. Its updated hourly, or so, instead of every second. MyAlltop is much easier to read than a Twitter feed.