I’m pretty sure most of you know what StumbleUpon is. And if you don’t I’m going to explain it in few words: Like a page? Stumble it. The more stumbles, the more visitors. And so on! Anyway, I’ve seen that StumbleUpon is responsible of a big load of traffic for every new post I make, and though the quality has been disputed, traffic is still traffic and as everything free, the more the better.

However, StumbleUpon’s traffic is not exactly free. If you’re a small blog like me, you need to build friends so that they stumble your content, and give them your favor back.

Anyway, the important part of this post is not to define StumbleUpon, but to see how to cheat or game the system. Yup, I’ve been there

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Two weeks ago, Darren from ProBlogger ran a poll about the most Popular Social Bookmarking Site. The most popular one was StumbleUpon (with 31%), and following were Del.icio.us with 21% and Digg with 19% (A little sidenote: All the three websites have a Google PR 8). Now let’s take a look at their Alexa Traffic Rank (for one year):

I must say this is one ugly JPG. A little higher quality might help you, Alexa

Let’s take a look at graph: both Digg and Delicious got a lower Alexa Rank than last year’s January, in fact, Delicious’ rank dropped heavily. But what about StumbleUpon? SU’s silently getting a better rank day by day. Let’s take a look at each site’s graph:

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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?

Photo by Jake Levin

I’m starting to think that the twenty-first century textbooks are not going to mention Adam Smith or Henry Ford. Instead, they will teach our kids about web entrepreneurs.

Anyway, do you recognize those three names? I’ve been reading lots of competition-related articles about ShoeMoney vs. John Chow. However, there’s something interesting with those three websites (besides being three of the biggest Make Money Online blogs): all three have a very similar Alexa Rank. Two of them also have a very similar RSS Feed Reader Subscription count (based on FeedBurner’s chicklet), but what about the third one?

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Let’s admit it. We’re all killing ourselves in a cyberwar for a better PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank. However, there’s one important measurement that has been left in obscurity for a while: FeedBurner Rank (no, it doesn’t exist).

My mission today was to find out what the top 5 sites by RSS FeedBurner count are. FeedBurner provides a small chiclet telling us how many users are subscribed to a particular blog/website. Since all the Top 5 websites have more than 100K subscribers (based on daily traffic), I don’t think it’s an insignificant datum.

However, more important, I would like to compare their FeedBurner subscriber count vs. Alexa and PageRank. I promise you’ll find interesting results…

Edit: I just found out that the Official Google Blog has 617K readers, but since they are responsible for both PageRank and FeedBurner, I’m not going to take them into account.

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Here’s my latest project on WebSoda: The WebCloud!

What’s the WebCloud anyway? Well, it’s the Top 50 website list on WebSoda.net, bigger websites represent websites with more votes, while those in vivid red are the ones with higher scores (either by Votes or Frequency).

One curious fact is that BodyBuilding.com is the most voted website (and has a very high score too). This is actually because the website was stickied in their forum, which generated many hundreds of votes. However, even though the websites are viewed on a random order, common websites such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Gmail, or Google, are quite big in the cloud too!

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We all know about Google’s PageRank system, and millions of websites are struggling in the war to compete for the top page on the Search Engine:

I mean, look it at it. Ten years ago (when Google was not worth $18bi), how would you convince your boss that it would be a good idea to buy stocks from a company whose logo is made out of Lego bricks? That’s why I love Google.

Google scores a clean 9.5 out of 10 from WebSoda’s rating (and don’t forget to vote! I promise it won’t take more than 5 seconds), and is viewed on a daily basis by all voters. I guess it’s really impressive to think that we are so dependent from Google!

I guess it’s no news that Google is ranked so high on WebSoda, but — here’s the real question: Is Google.com’s PageRank 10? If you install their toolbar, you’ll see that Google’s PageRank is actually 10. I’m just wondering (since PageRank is based on the votes from one website to another), is their PageRank calculated too, or is it set to a default 10?

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