Guru or Not?

The immense amount of information in the Internet can make anybody dizzy. If you search the Internet regularly, or make money online you need to digest lots of information. Every web page you visit wants to get your attention with the perfect design, catchy headlines, animations etc. For example, craigslist.org has the most basic, “ugly” design; however it is the 47th most popular website in the Internet according to Alexa.com and has a GPR = 8 (Google Page Rank) , which is very high. So will you avoid craigslist.org because of the design? “Yes” is the wrong answer, a lot of people as well as many small businesses make money on Craigslist. It is practically impossible to estimate the correct value of a web site from the appearance or even from the content unless you spend a considerable amount of time and do your research. So how to know who is who on the Internet?

Fortunately Google, Alexa and some other companies have created web page ranking solutions which are available for free.

1. Google PageRank or GPR is a score between 0 and 10. This is Google’s way to weight the importance of each and every web page in the Internet. Ultimately a page with a higher GPR will hold a higher position among all relevant search results. The calculation of a website’s GPR is based on the number of inbound links from other websites; moreover, the higher the GPR is of the contributing link, the bigger boost it will give to your rank.
A higher GPR will bring more free traffic in Google search and every webmaster thrives to get high PageRank, however, when you compare different websites it is important to understand that the GPR indicates the significance but not the traffic volume of the page. This means that a webpage with a GPR of 6 might have fewer visitors than the one with a GPR of 2.
Google issues PR for each individual web page, not for the whole website or domain. Usually the home page of the website has the highest GPR. To see the GPR for every web page in your browser you can download and install Google Toolbar and enable the PageRank option.

2. On the other hand, however, Alexa Rank (alexa.com is a division of amazon.com) is based on the traffic volume. According to Alexa’s definition Alexa Rank reflects both the number of users who visit the site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users. It would be convenient if Alexa simply showed traffic stats for each web site on the Internet, however it is not that simple. First of all they don’t have complete information about websites and do their best to provide data that is as precise as possible. There are also privacy and legal issues involved; until now most of Spyware detecting programs consider Alexa’s software as Spyware. Instead of traffic statistics Alexa uses the term “reach” which “is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site.” So if your Alexa rating is 100,000 that roughly means that 1/100,000 of all Internet Users who have Alexa toolbar visit your site for the given time period. We don’t take the Page Views under the consideration here. To see the Alexa Rank on your browser you can download and install Alexa Toolbar from alexa.com,

or go to alexa.com, enter your domain name on the Traffic Rankings page and see the results. Additionally, on alexa.com you can see some Geographic information as well. For my websites this data was completely wrong, not even close, so I wouldn’t recommend paying much attention to this block of information. To translate Alexa rank to the direct traffic volume you can use the graph at
http://www.sillyjokes.co.uk/alexa/index.php.
Alexa Rank gives very approximate information about the traffic and it could be different from real traffic stats by not percents but times. Saying this we acknowledge that for the time being Alexa Rank is the most known and accepted traffic indicator in the Internet. Although if you plan to advertise on the particular website relying on only Alexa is not recommended, you should ask for Google Analytics data or some other stats as well. One last note, Alexa ranks domains or whole websites and not web pages like Google. For example Alexa’s Rank for http://craigslist.org and for http://fortsmith.craigslist.org/bab/696290537.html is the same - 47.

3. The other emerging web rank provider is Quantcast.com. Quantcast Rank (QR), also estimates the traffic volume of a particular web site or domain. The main differences from Alexa are that QR shows the traffic volume directly and so far it is oriented to the U.S. market only. Because Quantcast Rank is designed to help web marketers make right advertising decisions it shows detailed demographics of the customer base of the website as well. Quantcast offers website owners free, direct, monitoring service. If you are advertising a lot on your website you might consider “Quantifying” your site by adding a code snippet into your web pages. This will allow advertisers to see your website’s statistics and your audience profile presented by the respected provider. Quantcast does not have toolbars so the only way to check your QR is by going to Quantcast.com and entering your domain name.

4. Compete.com using their own words “ranks the top one million websites in the U.S. based on the number of People the domain attracts each month.” Compete.com provides two categories of information: Site Analytics and Search Analytics. Site Analytics is a free and very useful service. You can enter up to 5 domain names into the available fields and click the “Get Site Analytics” button on the right side of the screen to generate the graph of Traffic Volume for the entered Websites. Search Analytics is a paid service and it shows you which keywords are sending traffic to your website. Although Search Analytics is a valuable service you can get more complete report about keywords from Google Analytics, which is free.

In this article, we reviewed the most known website ranking tools. Which one is the most important? From a webmasters point of view Google Page Rank is the most important because a higher GPR brings you a lot of free traffic which is possible to monetize easily. From an Internet researcher’s point of view the Alexa Rank is more important, because they don’t care how many inbound links you have, they need to see how much traffic you get.
Having the Google and Alexa Toolbars installed is an absolute must for anyone who wants to make money online. Install them if you don’t have them already and keep an eye on these indicators for every web page you visit.

Ranking Themselves – 06.06.2008

Links:
http://toolbar.google.com/
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500
http://www.quantcast.com/
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/