Thursday 4 November 2010

Blog rankings - how they stack up (or not)

I was interested to see a ranking of 20 religious blogs on the Church Mouse blog, based on the new Wikio ‘Religion Blogs’ rankings.

However, there are other blog rankings, based on different measures, which give (in some cases radically) different results. Wikio apparently relies particularly on ‘weighted’ links in and tries to give an estimate of a blog's notional ‘influence’, rather than simply its traffic, as measured by Alexa.

Below, therefore, are the same blogs as the Church Mouse lists, based on Alexa Traffic Rank (and the Alexa GB rank where known). The figure in brackets is the Wikio (Church Mouse) ranking. Two blogs in the Wikio list have no Alexa data, presumably because they are not registered with Alexa.

Let those of us who take our rankings seriously (mea culpa) beware!

1. (19) Will and Testament — 46, GB: 6
2. (8) eChurchWebsites Blog — 174,356, GB: 7,008.
3. (4) The Freethinker — 210,969, GB: none.
4. (2) Islam in Europe — 313,591, GB: none.
5. (18) Apologetics 315 — 356,711, GB: none.
6. (6) Thinking Anglicans — 381,122, GB: 22,312.
7. (9) Anglican Mainstream — 393,134, GB: 21,996.
8. (5) The hermeneutic of continuity — 415,730, GB: none.
9. (1) The Church Mouse Blog — 507,076, GB: 20,113.
10. (10) The Cartoon Blog — 507,569, GB: none.
11. (12) The Ugley Vicar — 731,992, GB: 32,395
12. (7) Bishop Alan’s Blog — 763,081, GB: 29,374
13. (3) Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion — 861,372, GB: none.
14. (11) Nick Baines’s Blog — 925,056, GB: 37,058
15. (14) Lesley’s Blog — 1,480,849, GB: 43,604
16. (16) An exercise in the fundamentals of orthodoxy — 1,513,398, GB: 66,268.
17. (20) The Changing Attitude Blog — 1,880,772, GB: none.
18. (15) Catholic and Loving it! — 2,002,886, GB: none.

(13) Epiphenom — no Alexa data
(17) Adrian Warnock — no Alexa data

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12 comments:

  1. Hi, I did a post on how Wikio ratings work? It struck me that it was rather incestuous as Wikio rates links from highly rated Wikio blogs.

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  2. umm, beware! beware of what? are these aspects of our faith threatening?

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  3. Well following your system (at least this has a system!) my blog http://www.liturgy.co.nz/blog comes in at number 4. It doesn't even feature on Church Mouse!

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  4. Rosanna, I was thinking of pride! Also time spent looking at blog rankings instead of getting a life.

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  5. Hi 'Liturgy'. I think CM's original list was simply the 'top twenty' on Wikio's new Religion Blog list (which isn't yet public!).

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  6. ahhh right that makes more sense thanks! thank you

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  7. John,

    For those of us who don't take rankings seriously, perhaps you could explain what all these numbers mean. 'Will and Testament', for example, has the number 46 against it. Is that a number of hits or a ranking or what?

    And what does the number 731,992 mean for you? Are you therefore the 731,992nd most popular religious blog in the world? Not very impressive, that.

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  8. John - you are quite right not to take these things too seriously. There are a number of other taking systems. I don't look at Alexa, however, as it claims to measure website hits and search hits, but it is wildly at odds with the traffic measures I have from Google Analytics, which I do trust. It also swings wildly (just checked my numbers on Alexa ahead of this comment, and it is already 4,000 different on the GB count from the number you quote).

    I'm pretty confident that a number of the blogs who rank lower according to the Alexa list above have much higher traffic than mine, and I am equally confident that the Will and Testament blog is not the sixth most read blog in Britain!

    Lesley - you are quite right that Wikio rankings favour blogs linked to from other wikio ranked blogs. I think this is the reason why craft related blogs rank so well in wikio - it seems inexplicable any other way! Nevertheless, it seems to be the best ranking system I can find.

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  9. Until now I had never even heard of wikio. And I presume they have never heard of my blog. That's the problem with these type of lists - they end up being ranking of blogs or sites that someone happens to know about - not very objective really. My site http://www.liturgy.co.nz/blog has over 10,000 visitors a week - others can work out from that where the blog should, hence, sit. It demonstrates these listings are very subjective.

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  10. Liturgy - the ranking on my blog is UK only, which is why you are not in it.

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  11. There is a US-based ranking thingy which seemed to aggregate across a batch of ranking sites: Alexa, Technorati, subscriptions on Google reader etc. http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Christianity. The only 3 UK based blogs in their top 50 are Tall Skinny Kiwi, eChurch, and Adrian Warnock, though one or two others in the above list turn up in some of rankings by individual indicator.

    It's always been my belief that somewhere in the blogosphere is a list which puts your blog at no.1, the difficulty is in finding it.

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  12. @church mouse. There is no evidence nor requirement for churchmousepublishing.blogspot.com to be UK based. Nor any evidence or requirement for mine not to be.

    One of the powerful parts of the internet is that it crosses borders, turning us into a global village. It is a nightmare for copyright lawyers. The concept of trying to restrict internet within countries is fascinating and certainly worthy of further discussion. China attempts it. Many sites are anonymous. 14 of the last 15 of my posts would make perfect sense in the UK, and every week I comment on the CofE Common Worship choices.

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