I have heard not once that Alexa ratings are worthless. While I agree that Alexa may not be very precise in general, I believe it is a good indicator if websites from the same category are compared. The critical piece here is that the visitors’ demographics is similar. If this is the case then approximately the same percentile of visitors to each site will use Alexa toolbar, which in turn will mean that the Alexa rank will be equally weighted.
Let’s use Personal Finance blogs as our target category and verify how well indirect indicators like Alexa and Technorati correlate with direct ones, RSS readers and daily visitor/page view counts. Here are the kinds of stats I was able to collect:
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Alexa rank, 3 months moving average. Calculated based on data from visitors who use Alexa toolbar in their browsers. |
Google Page rank, updated once every 3 months. Number of back links to the blog is one of the factors affecting this number | |
Technorati Rank is calculated based on how many times the blog is linked by other blogs in the past 6 months | |
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RSS readers count via FeedBurner. I have collected these numbers using the same trick that I used in the past |
Number of times the blog (with and without “www” prefix) is tagged in Del.icio.us | |
Average daily visitors data for the past week. I was able to collect it because many blogs publish their stats via SiteMeter. | |
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Average pageviews data for the past week. Collected via SiteMeter as well. |
The table below is just raw data. I spent all night compiling it and didn’t really have time to make any conclusions (the analysis is now available here). I will take a closer look at it tomorrow and will share with you what I find. Meanwhile you are welcome to do your own analysis in the comments. ;-)
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The Simple Dollar | 24189 | 5 | 1499 | 6455 | 843 | 13426 | 26893 |
Get Rich Slowly | 26883 | 6 | 1428 | 19258 | 1884 | 8037 | 14552 |
Personal Finance Advice | 33005 | 5 | 1934 | 266 | |||
I Will Teach You to be Rich | 38348 | 6 | 3861 | 2394 | |||
Blueprint for Financial Prosperity | 40822 | 5 | 8745 | 3411 | 50 | 2867 | 4437 |
My Money Blog | 44138 | 6 | 7297 | 606 | |||
Consumerism Commentary | 44278 | 0 | 10294 | 2981 | 214 | 1859 | 3303 |
Five Cent Nickel | 44837 | 5 | 11891 | 2518 | 144 | 2701 | 4489 |
Free Money Finance | 51194 | 6 | 5731 | 270 | 3044 | 6104 | |
Clever Dude | 63252 | 2 | 18394 | 417 | 39 | 491 | 680 |
Zillow Blog | 69853 | 6 | 10328 | 2068 | 74 | ||
My Financial Journey | 71352 | 4 | 21625 | 221 | 20 | 696 | 917 |
Lazy Man and Money | 78837 | 4 | 412 | 20 | 426 | 754 | |
All Financial Matters | 79074 | 5 | 19206 | 2911 | 281 | 1783 | 3005 |
Money, Matter, and More Musings | 90057 | 4 | 3215 | 772 | 45 | ||
Money Smart Life | 91747 | 4 | 18394 | 368 | 16 | 709 | 1207 |
Punny Money | 93784 | 5 | 35187 | 517 | 30 | 335 | 537 |
Neville’s Financial Blog | 99697 | 5 | 18766 | 195 | |||
Fat Pitch Financials | 104790 | 5 | 20162 | 1037 | 65 | 473 | 825 |
Mighty Bargain Hunter | 105539 | 5 | 18976 | 880 | 81 | 763 | 1973 |
The Digerati Life | 109456 | 4 | 2648 | 442 | 21 | ||
Personal Finance Journey | 110272 | 6 | 25967 | 387 | 893 | 2251 | |
Wheaties for Your Wallet | 113019 | 6 | 44 | ||||
The Sun’s Financial Diary | 119299 | 4 | 368 | 16 | |||
No Credit Needed | 121289 | 5 | 19077 | 49 | |||
Blogging Away Debt | 133798 | 5 | 13230 | 875 | 76 | 1022 | 2865 |
My 1st Million at 33 | 146675 | 5 | 15264 | 717 | 91 | ||
Rate Ladder | 156128 | 2 | 81 | 9 | |||
Binary Dollar | 157077 | 4 | 363 | 23 | |||
Boston Gal’s Open Wallet | 162412 | 5 | 18556 | 544 | 108 | ||
Getting Green | 186997 | 3 | 40597 | 146 | 22 | 879 | 1357 |
Finandom | 188080 | 3 | 90666 | 70 | 0 | ||
Getting Finances Done | 190984 | 5 | 28759 | 1 | 521 | 802 | |
2 Million | 198539 | 2 | 25090 | 51 | |||
My Two Dollars | 205657 | 4 | 48187 | 109 | 7 | 512 | 948 |
Generation X Finance | 225513 | 4 | 33779 | 472 | 43 | 721 | 1088 |
Stop Buying Crap | 240275 | 5 | 1208 | 123 | |||
The Finance Journey | 242233 | 4 | 65769 | 7 | 104 | 180 | |
Hustler Money Blog | 266905 | 3 | 176 | 14 | |||
Mapgirlās Fiscal Challenge | 286264 | 5 | 43923 | 57 | 0 | 210 | 362 |
Queer Cents | 294863 | 5 | 0 | 768 | 1299 | ||
Canadian Capitalist | 309444 | 5 | 641 | 53 | |||
We are in Debt | 329162 | 4 | 30980 | 499 | 41 | ||
My Open Wallet | 329535 | 6 | 18871 | 460 | 128 | ||
Money Musings | 329587 | 4 | 50507 | 1454 | 0 | ||
My Money Forest | 352494 | 5 | 56308 | 124 | 21 | 73 | 95 |
Blunt Money | 352903 | 3 | 51777 | 5 | |||
Ask Mr Credit Card | 380771 | 3 | 0 | ||||
Make Love Not Debt | 389132 | 5 | 28290 | 94 | |||
Frugal Duchess | 390220 | 5 | 32285 | 22 | 316 | 436 | |
No Limits Ladies | 400449 | 4 | 3712 | 23 | |||
How to Make a Million Dollars | 402206 | 4 | 76349 | 21 | 6 | 61 | 83 |
Young and Broke | 403449 | 5 | 71 | ||||
Experiments in Finance | 413163 | 5 | 56308 | 94 | 25 | 401 | 759 |
Zen Personal Finance | 438991 | 6 | 20162 | 75 | 312 | 514 | |
Its Just Money | 439008 | 5 | 30980 | 9 | 607 | 978 | |
Tired But Happy | 457058 | 5 | 27 | 271 | 366 | ||
Single Ma’s Fabulous Financials | 458701 | 5 | 27256 | 190 | 24 | ||
Fire Finance | 462317 | 3 | 6579 | 87 | 6 | ||
Poorer Than You | 465178 | 0 | 86478 | 102 | 2 | 174 | 284 |
Not Made of Money | 471813 | 4 | 105218 | 198 | 2 | 838 | 1546 |
My Retirement Blog | 495712 | 2 | 120609 | 0 | 60 | 93 |
Update: The experiment was in part inspired by this great analysis done at SEOmoz blog
Nice table – pity I’m not included ;(
One thing I noticed with my blog is that the move from blogspot URL to my own domain (redirected to blogspot) stuffed up my technorati ranking, google pagerank etc, as I know have a mix of links to the old URL and the new:
http://enoughwealth.blogspot.com
http://enoughwealth.com
I also mirror my content onto
http://enoughwealth.savingadvice.com
and it’s interesting that the readership of savingadvice hosted blogs seems discrete from those that frequent pfblogs etc. I’ve had a fairly steady readership of around 40/day on blogspot, but get around 95/day on the savingadvice site.
Regards
http://enoughwealth.com
Very interesting, I love facts and figures. What about your site? What are your stats and rank?
Thanks for mentioning my blog. I guess alexa does give you a sense of how your blog is “doing” in your space. Having said that, new and upcoming blogs will have have “good” alexa scores. But they should not be dismissed because of that.
Interesting. I just ran some quick stats (following appropriate transformations) and found that everything but PageRank in your table is (individually) significantly correlated with Alexa ranking. However, when I ran a multiple regression (i.e., considered all factors simultaneously), most of those effects went away, leaving just Technorati ranking as a good predictor of Alexa ranking.
It’s strange I’m the only PR 2 in the top ~27 of the list (next one is Rateladder.com). Everyone else is PR 4 or above.
Perhaps I should actually have hope I’ll bump up to a 5 after this current google PR update! My site started at 4 until the last update in December/January when I dropped to a 2.
Thanks Yan!
John:
My stats as of yesterday:
Alexa: 77324
Page Rank: 4
Technorati: 24593
RSS: 714
Del.icio.us: 72
Visitors: 899
Page Views: 2115
I didn’t include my blog since I didn’t feel it was a good match to the Personal Finance category.
fivecentnickel.com:
Could you share details on how you calculated the correlation?
Clever Dude:
You should complain to Google. ;-)
Seriously though, a lot of factors affect Page Rank. It is mostly influenced by back links but from what I know even the type of websites that link to you can make the difference.
I have about 650 backlinks, which isn’t too bad. Alot of them are from sites in the top 10 above like nickel and many other financial blogs.
I feel the update coming on really soon. My PR is showing at 0 for all but 4 of google’s servers. That either means those servers are ready to reset or my PR really dropped to 0 (like Flexo’s). We’ll find out soon though!
I notice you don’t have the RSS or Sitemeter stats for PoorerThanYou. The RSS I understand – I took down the chicklet. However, it’s still active, so you can call it up via http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/PoorerThanYou
Of course, I tell you this on a day that my RSS subscribership is down a significant amount! ;)
But the SiteMeter stats are easily accessible, right on my site. http://www.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s31poorer
Stephanie:
What was your RSS count yesterday?
I also noticed a big drop today for my blog. Google Feedfetcher part of subscribers fell more than twice. I account it for some technical issues at FeedBurner or Google.
http://www.technorati.com/profile/mapgirl
Try going there for my Technorati rank. I don’t quite know how to fix it, but I’ll work on that someday.
Interesting compilation though. Thanks for doing it. Makes me wonder if I could be doing more.
mapgirl:
I had the same problem and fixed it just recently. Submitting the issue to Technorati forums is what did the trick for me.
http://support.technorati.com/
Awesome list, you really put in the effort. I have to check out some of those sites.
Thanks for the list, Yan! You must have spent lots of time on this. There’s a problem with my Technorati rank since it appears stuck at 25 links all the time. I emailed them about the problem, but never got a reply.
Wow…you must have incredible patience. This rocks. :)
Thanks for doing this. Some people say “ha..numbers mean nothing”…but I won’t be surprised to see some of them visiting this post 10 times a day to compare their numbers with others. :)
Wow- I am impressed by how much research you did! I didn’t even know that about NLL! We started it as a hobby, but hey, we’ve been doing this for a while now, we might as well do it right, huh? lol
Nice research! I appreaciate that you included my site, Fat Pitch Financials.
Hey fivecentnickel, I’d love to see your statistical analysis on this table. Are you planning on posting your results?
Thanks, George. I have just finished my analysis and you are going to see it posted very soon, maybe later today
Nice work Yan! This is probably the most comprehensive ranking I’ve ever seen.
I know people tend to say they don’t care about stats, but I think PF bloggers are naturally pretty curious about numbers in general. We love to measure performance. =)
For what it’s worth, here’s Wise Bread’s data:
Alexa: 22,468
Page Rank: 6
Technorati: 2808
RSS: 1340
Del.icio.us: 208
That was harsh. No my blog is not about Personal Finance. Apologies.
Sorry it may have sounded harsh. I made the assumption in the very first paragraph of my blog post. By the way, I have done the analysis of this data already. In case you missed it, here is the link:
http://probargainhunter.com/20.....-analysis/
Yan,
The Alexa Rank Bias is most apparent when I look at this list that you’ve created. Even though I’m sure that my blog receives less visitors than sites like Get Rich Slowly or The Simple Dollar, my rank is better than them.
Probably because my blog deals more about linkbuilding/SEO/Webmaster related stuff. I’m linking through to my post on Alexa Ranking if anyone is interested :)
Will
Thanks for stopping by. Your numbers do look impressive! Care to share average daily visitors / pageviews as well?
Maki
You are missing the point. Alexa makes perfect sense when apples to apples are compared, that is blogs/websites from the same category. Is your blog about Personal Finance?
I know you couldn’t include every PF blog but my blogs BankBonuses.info and TightFistedMiser.com both have Alexa rating in the 200,000’s so they would have made the list.
One of these days…. one of these days… I am going to be up there with the big boys…