Friday, May 25, 2007

More additions to the PA top Technorati ranks table

The top technorati ranks table for Planet Atheism members has been improved again. :) In addition to showing the Technorati rank, number of incoming links (from Technorati as well), and Google Pagerank, the table now shows Alexa ranks as well.

You can now also click on any of the above column titles to sort the table by that particular value/rank. Incoming links and Pagerank are "the more, the merrier", while Technorati rank and Alexa rank are "the lower, the better", so sorting takes that into account.

A note of warning: I've mentioned before that you shouldn't really take any of these ranks too seriously, and this is especially true for the Alexa ranks. Alexa is a nice idea (it's the only one that measures traffic instead of incoming links), but it has the following problems:
  • it only counts hits if the user has installed either the Alexa toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or the SearchStatus Firefox extension (I recommend the latter, since, as everyone knows, MSIE sucks), and
  • it often lumps all subdomains for a particular domain together (i.e. doesn't distinguish between aaa.domain.com and bbb.domain.com, even though they may be totally unrelated). It apparently has some hard coded exceptions for some (not all) blogspot.com blogs... but the values aren't really reliable. Still, you can use it to measure the changes in traffic for one site.
Incidentally, the application I've coded (and have been improving) to generate this table from a list of blogs is almost ready for public release. :)

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