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!

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