As the name suggests, This post is about reviewing the reviewer, Indian Top Blogs. It also try to show the journey of our blog(There are miles to go..). We had submitted our blog for review to IndianTopBlogs.com and their review is given verbatim-no changes, no modifications.
Table of Contents
What is a blog?
A “blog” is an abbreviated word for web-log, is a web-based journal in which people can publish their thoughts and opinions on the Internet. It is everyone’s home on the world wide web and probably their number one venting venue.
Why does one blog?
One question and so many answers, some for money, some for the notoriety, and some just because they want to. Blogging is a way of having my say, expressing my opinion. Read on the net: OK, my blog is probably going to be full of ranting! Isn’t that what blogs are for? Just write about whatever, ramble on.. I am VERY good at rambling! Found an interesting post by Sujatha on WWW = why writers write and Aakhir Kyon
Wanted: Readers
After the initial technical hurdle of where to host the blog, paid or free, if free – wordpress.com or blogspot , the layout etc People start blogging. They write and write..saying they are doing for themselves. But then after a point they wonder..wish there would be someone to read to tell us do what they write makes sense? Is content good? They start informing their family, their friends. Some of them might oblige them by reading an article or two but it is a busy world! In search of readers the blogger joins a blog directory like indiblogger /blogadda/blogjunta – a community of like minded people-the bloggers, your peers. They start getting some readers, some may vote, some may comment. The blogger is happy atleast someone is reading my posts! Blogging , like love and life, is a two way street. The blogger also reads some blogs, posts comments, builds a network.
Wanted: Review of the blog
The serious blogger is not satisfied. Blogger is wondering. Is the content good? Is the layout good? Is the navigation good? The color scheme? Platforms like indiblogger have a feature where you can ask for review of the blog. Some of the bloggers are brave, courageous enough to ask for the review of their blog. Their heart is in their mouth, what if no-one likes it, or gives bad reviews. They may not get any feedback or the feedback they get is not detailed enough. The blogger is on lookout of a reviewer- a non biased one.
Reviewer: IndiaTopBlogs.com
The above journey was what our blog went through. While we had started getting some readers we were still on lookout for a detailed review- we didn’t want to be a mother who is blind to her child’s faults or ignored of her child’s strengths. We stumbled upon IndiaTopBlogs.com India’s best blogs in one place. We went through their website and decided to submit our blog for review. We knew it would take time and sent reminder after a month. But the wait was worth it, the review was detailed (they even reported the punctuation error) – like a report card in school with more cons than pros. We have reproduced the review verbatim below. We are thankful to the team of IndianTopBlogs.com for the effort they took . We have tried to incorporate their suggestions(struggling with the length of articles 🙂 ) and can say proudly say it is better than before.
Review of the Reviewer
The process of getting reviewed by Indiantopblogs is clearly defined. For Details click here.
- Review starts by sending an email to kp.nd.2008@gmail.com with the address [URL] of your blog. They say that they need a proof that the blog belongs to you, but we did not know what to provide. They didn’t ask maybe because the email bemoneyaware@gmail.com was the same as our blog address bemoneyaware.com/blog.
- They do not charge for any service given through the Indian Top Blogs such as including a blog in Indian blog rankings or the Directory of Best Indian Blogs.
- How much time they take to review. On the website they mention It depends upon the number of review requests we receive As of mid-2011, we are taking about a month. In our case, we submitted for review on 1st August 2011 and got our review by 18th Oct 2011. Seems they are getting lots of requests.
- How to track: It is easy to track whether your blog has been reviewed or not by checking the date of clearance in the bottom right widget onIndian Top Blogs.
Status of the review
- How long have they been doing it: There website mentions since February 2011. And they have reviewed 284 blogs.(as shown in the image above)
- What do their review focuses on? As mentioned on the webpage here Indian Top Blogs reviews blogs for content, design, interactivity, scheduling and other aspects that have a bearing on the quality of any blog. We may also give you some off-the-cuff technical advice but, let us admit, that is not our forte. We are, as of now, not in a position to give advice on search engine optimisation (SEO), and we do not intend to give half-baked advice.
- How is the review? We are very satisfied with the review. They listed both the positive and negative points. We are working on the cons and so far did not find anything that didn’t seem genuine. The review verbatim is given below for you to decide yourself. What we missed was the before & after picture so!
- Is everyone satisfied with their review? No Infact they mention specifically about this review which rants about them and is not at all happy with them. For details you can read their post Blogosphere surveys, the blog directory and a sham!
- Rankings: They rank the blogs into platinum, gold and excellent blogs. No we haven’t made into any of these category not yet ! On how they rank Step 1:Mathematical screening feverishly looked at of over five thousand Indian blogs. Out of them, about a thousand blogs met our mathematical screening criteria. We put them into the process of close scrutiny and came out with a list of about 200 blogs. Ref: June blogosphere survey of Indian blogs Step 2: Manual process: giving marks to each blog on each of the many criteria, mixing marks given by each member, filtering blogs based on these criteria, examining the remaining blogs again and screening them for more stringent criteria. More details on the June Blogosphere Survey of Indian Blogs
- Who are the people behind Indian Top blog spots: Quoting from their website(Comments section here)We are a small group, all located in Delhi. Right now, we do not want to give more details as we are in other jobs and work on the IndianTopBlogs as a hobby. Though our work here does not interfere with our other responsibilities, we do not want to create a notion of conflict of interests. Hope, you appreciate that. We’ll give our full details once we have a sure-footing in the blogging world.
Review of our blog verbatim
- Yours is an appealing, professionally created and well-maintained blog. Congratulations!
- The ‘folded notebook on a table’ design, neat and expressive title bar and readable posts are all fine. Posts are distinct and rather exhaustive; they have clean headers and footers. The sidebar is unobtrusive and uncluttered. The blog bottom is clean.
- You give external references in posts. It gives the reader a chance to further research the topic. Fine.
- You have used images profusely on the blog posts; they are relevant and also have captions. Great!
- You are regular in blogging. You also interact well with those who comment on your posts. You have used ‘jump break’ to shorten your posts in ‘categories’.
- Yours is a very new blog and yet have clocked Google PR 4 and Alexa rank 7.2 lakh. Excellent! Keep up the discipline of posting regularly.
Now a few suggestions/ comments for your consideration:
- Since this blog is part of your main website, you should give a link back to the main site.
- The blog title is not clickable. One needs to click on the little ‘home’ under the title to navigate to the homepage from another page.
- The black bar under the title bar is a bit too thick for the font you use for ‘Home’. Why not use this bar for showcasing some of your best stuff?
- The ‘Switch to the mobile site’ link is dead. The search box respnds to ‘enter’ key but the magnifying glass icon does not respond.
- Do you need ‘My daily popular’ and ‘My popular posts’ both? They confuse rather than adding great value to the blog. The first one sound odd too.
- What are the numbers after the entries in ‘My daily popular’ and ‘My popular posts’? Are they page views or unique visitors? The daily number does not match with the number given at the end of the post.
- Your post heading font is a bit too big. Underline tends to join lines when the heading is more than one line [as is often the case].
- ‘Written by amin’ under the post heading: does it serve a special purpose? If not, do remove it.
- Some of your posts turn to be very long, and they also pull the entire blog downwards. Consider using ‘jump break’ to break the post into visible and ‘read the rest…’ parts , or serialising a subject into two or more posts.
- Consider raising the font size of text in posts by one point. Even if you want to stick to the present size, do increase font size in comments.
- Do you have all the rights of the graphics that you use on the blog? We have discussed this matter in greater details here.
- Use of different font colours is fine, and it helps to break monotony and separate passages of different types. We find good use of this in your blog for separating quotes and external references from your own narrative and for sub-headings. However, we find that it is not the standard practice. Same goes for bold and italic text.
- While we didn’t notice many grammatical errors in your text, there were numerous punctuation errors. We give below some errors that we noticed in your KBC post: it’s[for its], 8:30p.m, 10:00 p.m, Channel.According, theIncome, liabilityand, atleast, it charge, contestent, brands.Sudhan. Our advice is that you re-edit your posts before publishing them.
Blogging is not as easy as it seems. It needs lot of time, commitment and Readers. Though there are bloggers who have made it large, most of us struggle to make money out of the blog! In this journey of blogging, we meet lot of people, communities who help us. We are thankful, from the bottom of our heart, to indiblogger and indiantopblogs . What do you think about blogging? If you blog-Has your journey been different? How was the the review of indiantopblogs.com ?
wow. great post. even i submitted my blog to indiantopblogs but was bit skeptical about the entire review thing. but ur post clarified their process and the reason why they take time. although my blog doesn’t deserve to be reviewed by anybody and if at all i get a review from them then perhaps it will be in the form of an advice to look for an alternate hobby :D. one more thing i don’t think anyone will actually publish the cons of their blog. hats off to you.
Debajyoti you write well..so no need for looking for alternative hobby :-).
The entire purpose of writing the review was to appreciate the hard work that they put manually to review the blog. Without the cons review would have been biased.
I was wondering where I got the idea of indiantopblogs from..as your website had changed could not
find the link. I think as they are reviewing they are getting better or maybe they got so engrossed in
your Conversations that they forgot to review it 🙂
Page ranks are just a number just as indiblogger rank. The only thing that matters is comments on the post
and maybe votes on indiblogger and you are much…much ahead than me maam on that.
For reviewing the review the review of the reviewer, I submitted the post to indiblogger 🙂
Coming from you-a strong advocate for voting for the good posts it means a lot. Best
of Luck to you too. I am big fan of your writing style.! Thanks for wishes and same to
you too.
VEry USeFul InfoRmatIon ThaNk YOU..
KEeP blOggIng
🙂
THanks FOr DRopping. KEeP Coming