Technorati Top 5 Blogs don’t reach the Top 500 in Alexa Rank
Today I was checking Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs (based on their authority) and found out that, while all of them have very respectful pageranks (7~8), none of them reach the Top 500 most visited websites based on Alexa Traffic Rank.
So, how is Technorati Authority calculated? From their blog:
Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.
It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.
Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.
So how is it different from PageRank? (Skip if you already know) First of all, PageRank counts the number of links pointing to a website. Second (and most important), Google takes into account the page’s importance. For example, a external link from a high PR website is much more valuable than a link from a low PR website.
Anyway, I was checking the Top 5 blogs (in order: Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Hufftington Post, and BoingBoing) and found out that none of them reach the Top 500 in the Alexa Traffic Rank. Their ranks are 663 for the highest, and 3473 for the lowest. Though I understand that Alexa may not be the best metric, it gives us a good idea on higher ranks.
High PageRank, Low Alexa Rank
It’s interesting to note that, while all the website have a very high PageRank, their Alexa Rank is not high enough. In a certain way, Google’s PageRank does not give you traffic results, and thinking that two websites with a PR 8 are equally high-trafficked is wrong. Just to give you a real-life example, both Gizmodo and StumpleUpon have a PR 8, but StumbleUpon’s Alexa Rank is #311, almost four hundred ranks over Gizmodo. But of course, Google never said that they offered traffic details, right? Then it’s important to emphasize on Alexa a little bit…
Why isn’t there any blog on the Top 500?
While I do believe that blogs are shaping the WWW as we knew it a few years ago, readers are much more distributed. Since there are so many different categories, having one blog ruling all the other ones would be practically impossible. However, I really would have thought that there would be at least one of the Technorati Top Blogs on Alexa’s Top 500, I mean, with so many blogs? Well then…
Who owns the Top 500 spots?
I’m half way done with a categorized list based on Alexa’s Top 500. This is where the real website trends come, so stay tuned for my next post!
Conclusion (for now…):
Blogs are an important part of our daily internet life. But still, there is no Google one blog authority that is outranking everyone else. Maybe it’s a matter of time before a Superior Blog comes and ranks on the Top 500 websites on Alexa, but my guess is that it ain’t happening soon. What do you think?
Stumble it!
February 7th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Technorati’s authority is broken. They need to re-evaluate their system because in my own personal experience as well as many people that I know a lot of the links aren’t being counted. And if that’s what they are basing their authority on, then there is definitely a problem
February 8th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Although Technorati doesn’t weight links like Google PageRank does, the trickle down affect of being linked to from one of the top sites can be huge.
For example, if TechCrunch mentions me in an article, I’ll get +1 Technorati Authority. Ho Hum.
The real benefit is all the other blogs that follow TechCrunch and link to me because of it.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Yup, getting linked in a big blog will definitely bring in links from smaller ones
I’m not a big fan of Technorati Authority nor the other systems, however, comparing all of them could lead to interesting results. Of course all of them can be misleading but at least is better than nothing!
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