NOVEMBER 29, 2005 - Posted By Geoffrey Mack
Blog Rankings?
For years Alexa has provided traffic rankings for
Web sites from aarp.org to zappos.com. Then, about
five years ago we created some special rules so
that we could provide rankings for homepages on
sites like geocities and tripod. These rules
allowed people to write reviews of their favorite
personal homepages, compare traffic rankings,
create related links and more.
But we never created similar rules for the blog
hosting sites. Sure, you could get a traffic
ranking for a blog if it happened to be hosted
with its own domain name -- sites like
wonkette.com or kottke.org. But, if you were Attu
(attu.blogspot.com) you were out of luck. The best
you could get was the ranking for your host,
blogspot.com, but not for your own blog.
But now that is changing: Alexa is ranking
individual blogs.
Go to you favorite blog, click the "Site Info"
button on your Alexa toolbar and check it out. You
can see rankings, related links and more for your
blogs.
There are still a few wrinkles to iron out. For
example, you can't review blogs yet. We are also
adding to our list of known blog hosts... if we
aren't ranking your individual blog, let us know
about it and we will do our best to track it too.
Another change is that we are actually counting
blog and homepage traffic twice... once for the
individual blog or homepage, and again for the
host. If you take a look at Geocities traffic
history graph you are going to see a HUGE jump in
traffic starting today. This is because all the
traffic that was previously only counted toward
the homepages is now also counted toward the host.
All the usual disclaimers about the traffic
rankings apply particularly to blogs and personal
homepages which will overwhelmingly fall outside
of Alexa's Top 100,000. Caveats abound here. In
short, if you fall outside the Top 100,000, you
may want to take your rankings with a grain of
salt.
Enjoy!