Looks like Alex and I aren’t the only folks obsessing about their blogs’ rankings. It’s not an especially healthy preoccupation for the two of us; for a corporation that depends on at least some reputation for tech savvy, it’s downright dumb — especially if they wind up getting it spectacularly wrong.
GoDaddy has issued a news release that should never have seen the light of day. It claims that founder Bob Parsons operates the 23rd most popular blog on the Internet. (Just what prompted the news release is unclear, unless it was the embarrassment of the recent Guantanamo Bay fiasco.)
They reach this number using an odd methodology. See if you can follow: They take the Technorati top 100 blogs. They order the blogs according to each one’s Alexa traffic ranking. They then find the Bob Parsons blog Alexa traffic figure, count the number of the Technorati blogs whose Alexa figure is higher… come up with the number 22… and decide that they must therefore be number 23.
Here’s the first problem. Parsons’ blog isn’t in the Technorati top 100… or top 1000. According to Technorati’s Niall Kennedy, Parsons’ blog clocks in at number 5,014. (That may be a typo – as of right now, I make it 4,105. Still, if I had that rank, it would dramatically shift the balance of my relationship with Alex. But I don’t, and it won’t. C’est la vie.)
So even if that algorithm made any sense, GoDaddy would really have to calculate Alexa scores for each of the 4,004 non-top-100- but-still-outranking-Parsons- in-Technorati-ranking blogs. For that matter, if blog #4,105 can leapfrog the top 100 in this system, why couldn’t blog #4,106 clear them all? Shouldn’t they be doing Alexa rankings for the top 5,000 – or 10,000?
That’s if their algorithm makes any sense, and there’s the second problem: it’s crazy. Alexa has a completely different ranking system from Technorati’s. GoDaddy’s claim isn’t just based on comparing apples to oranges; it’s multiplying oranges by apples, dividing by peach and subtracting the square root of kiwi fruit.
And what makes Alexa a good score of a blog’s popularity? Links to Parsons’ blog appear throughout GoDaddy’s heavily visited site (their Alexa traffic rank is 506; the White House clocks in far behind at 3,039). It’s not a far stretch to assume much – or even most – of the traffic at Parsons’ blog consists of curious GoDaddy surfers who click on the link, glance at the blog and never come back.
Raw traffic tells you little about a blog’s popularity. The reason Technorati has such a big footprint in the blogging world is that it attempts to measure a blog’s participation in the broader blogging conversation, via the number of other bloggers citing (or at least linking to) that blog’s posts.
GoDaddy’s PR people don’t seem to understand how Technorati works, either. They explain Parsons’ absence from the Technorati top 100 this way: “Technorati ranks blogs according to the
most “click-throughs” on commonly-searched keywords. http://www.bobparsons.com covers
a variety of topics, many of which do not contain such keywords”.
Absolute nonsense, says Kennedy: “The Technorati Top 100 ranks blogs based on the number of unique inbound sources. Yes, the counts do not update as often as most people would like, but that’s another issue Technorati is working. No keywords or click-throughs influence the Technorati Top 100.”
The funny thing is, 4,105 would normally be a pretty respectable ranking. Nothing worth a news release, but a solid number.
But by using an indefensible methodology to claim a leading place in the blogging world, GoDaddy loses even that credibility. I suspect their PR department is about to learn that there are few commodities more valuable than journalists’ trust and their time; this news release manages to waste both.
