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The title of a feed is "unknown title" in Google reader. What could be the reason? Am I correct if I'm assuming that it should be appearing similar for all the subscribers of that feed and other feed-readers (other than Google reader) as well.

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3  
This is not necessarily answerable without knowing what the actual feed is. As for being the same across all readers, not necessarily. They all make decisions about how liberal they are with input and how much extra work they're willing to do to resolve problems. – Su' Aug 10 '11 at 20:38

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Would have been helpful to post your feed link... Anyway RSS feeds need a <title> tag. Here is the basic format the feed should be in:

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Your Title</title>
    <link>http://example.com</link>
    <description>Example</description>

    <item>
      <!-- item details -->
    </item>
    <!-- many more items -->

  </channel>
</rss>
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up vote 3 down vote

Make sure you validate the feed, at least:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/

Doesn't guarantee it will work, but certainly helps.

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Thanks Jeff, yes, it did help, the feed was valid according to this validator you mentioned, but in recommendations it pointed out that title was blank (as also suggested by Nick and DisgruntledGoat below). Thanks all! :) – Atul Goyal Aug 11 '11 at 9:56
I recommend accepting the others answers, it sounds like my answer wasn't the most helpful, the checkmark should go to those who answered best! – Jeff Atwood♦ Aug 11 '11 at 9:59
Actually I accepted your answer for the validator link, as I thought that this validator would help even in problems when something else may be wrong/missing, but yes, it looks like the other 2 answers are more specific to this particular question. BTW help me in deciding which of the answers to accept now as both of them solves the problem and appear to be complementary to each other! Should I go with more upvotes or the one which (slightly) looks better! In any case, I'd definitely come back to upvote all these 3 answers when I've 15 rep. :) – Atul Goyal Aug 11 '11 at 10:53
up to you, but I generally favor the longer and more comprehensive answers in my accepts. – Jeff Atwood♦ Aug 11 '11 at 16:21
up vote 2 down vote

Your feed is possibly missing the <title> tag. View the source for your feed page and search for the text "<title>" to confirm this. The tag will likely be missing or empty.

To help resolve it, you'd need to share what's generating the RSS feed, be it CMS software (which?) or a custom script.

If Google Reader can't find a title, the chances are high that other feed readers can't either.

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