Ever wonder who has the most popular finance blog?
I decided to compile a list of the finance blogs on my radar screen and sort them by Alexa ranking. I tracked the blogs in December and January, assigning them an average Alexa for that time period. I also included each blog’s Technorati ranking, where available.
Domain RankingI’m interested in how few finance blogs make it into the Alexa Top 100k. #1 on the list, Herb Greenberg, has the highest Alexa only because he is on the Marketwatch domain. I left him in the #1 position for symbolic reasons; there are a bunch of guys writing for big domain names which makes it difficult to track their true popularity. On the flipside, I could not rank bloggers purely by Technorati, since that would be such an unrepresentative sample.
And the winner is…
Seeking Alpha and Blogging Stocks are essentially high quality blog aggregators, which accounts for their high rank and popularity. Therefore, the highest ranking truly individual blogger on my list is Barry Ritholtz at bigpicture.typepad.com/. Operating a hedge fund and single-handedly writing an Alexa 18,000 blog is a huge accomplishment.
Feel free to browse the list, and let me know of any finance blogs you think I should include.
UPDATE: JANUARY 28A number of you have written in suggesting finance blogs to include in this list. Please, keep the suggestions coming! The original 40 listed below are just blogs I personally read, so don’t feel snubbed if your blog isn’t on the list yet. I plan on creating a new updated list and publishing it here on Tuesday.
Adding Your Blog to the list:
Post a comment. Please be careful with too many links. Some of you are accidentally ending up in the spam folder.
Alexa and Fairness:
Some of you point out that Alexa rankings are occasionally dubious. I agree the system is not perfect (I blogged about Alexa accuracy here), but it’s the least bad system we’ve got. BobsAdviceforStocks made number 1 on my list of Ten Great Finance Blogs Flying Under the Radar but is not included on the list below because the tripod.com domain does not give him an Alexa ranking. Unfair! I’ve included technorati whereever possible. Let me know if you have suggestions on how to make the list more comprehensive (or fair!). Look for an update Tuesday.

How to Create Google & Yahoo Site Map
At TopRank we’ve been building Google & Yahoo site maps ever since each search engine debuted the service. However, recently I’ve been focusing on how to better automate the process and optimize my time spent creating site maps. I’ve researched and tried tool after tool until I came up with one that worked well for us.
It all started at Google. Google actually lists out a bunch of third party resources. How convenient! You can see them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
Ones listed under Programs/Code Snippets appear to be code that you add to your website to create your own sitemaps. What I was looking for is a program to create site maps for client sites, so those were out.
CMS and Other Plugins is a nice list of add-ons for your blogging software or content management system. These will create the sitemap automatically and are probably the easiest way to create a sitemap. However, this is only for the one site again, not what I’m looking for.
Next comes the Downloadable Tools. This is where I was hoping to find the best software, however I was disappointed. Since I have a nice G5 iMac, I stared with the two Mac applications. Both cost money, but if they work well, it would be worth it.
Rage Google Sitemap Automator crashed before doing anything. I’m not sure if it was a fluke, or if it had startup issues or if it didn’t like my OS version, but I didn’t care; I tried another.
Second was Map-IT Sitemapper. Again it costs, but I wanted to try it to see if it would be worth it. It seemed to only want to index files on my harddrive and not link out to the web. Since my willingness to ‘figure out’ software today is short, I moved on.
I also tried GSiteCrawler for the PC and it seemsed to work well and it was free. However it seemed kind of complex and I didn’t finish exploring its options.
Next came the best category, Online Generators. I tried SitemapsPal but didn’t like the little text box that I had to copy the code out of. Tried Pingoat, but I could only seem to get a few links. Out of more than a thousand pages, it only found about 12. I reported the issues to their support form and tried again. Next on my testing list was xml-sitemaps.com and I was finally very happy.
Not only does it create the sitemaps, but it creates them in xml, gz and txt formats. It works beautifully and it’s free! One downside is that it can only do up to 500 pages, but if you have more than 500 pages, hopefully you can find a plugin for your system to create the map for you. I’m very happy with xml-sitemaps.com and have since bookmarked it for future use.
There are plenty of more choices on the Google site and probably many more that Google doesn’t list. My question to you is, what do you use for creating Yahoo and Google sitemaps?

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