{"id":357,"date":"2007-05-17T18:36:20","date_gmt":"2007-05-17T10:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/web-analytics\/hold-the-alexa-here-comes-urlfan\/"},"modified":"2007-05-17T18:36:20","modified_gmt":"2007-05-17T10:36:20","slug":"hold-the-alexa-here-comes-urlfan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/web-analytics\/hold-the-alexa-here-comes-urlfan\/","title":{"rendered":"Hold the Alexa, here comes URLFan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, we know Alexa isn’t accurate, in fact it has a number of blindspots, but it’s a easily accessed public web metric. But for checking out the Web2.0-ness of your site, you might like to check out URLFan.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"urlfan.com\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What is URLFan?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.<\/p>\n

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”<\/p>\n

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”<\/p>\n

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader<\/a> (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo!<\/a> page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird<\/a> email\/RSS client.<\/p>\n

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:<\/p>\n

\"urlfan<\/p>\n

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.<\/p>\n

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!<\/p>\n

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I ran some blogs through the engine.<\/p>\n

Problogger<\/a>
\nRanks 150 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 927 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 1543 posts.<\/p>\n

Shoemoney<\/a>
\nRanks 1036 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 219 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 387 posts.<\/p>\n

JohnChow<\/a>
\nRanks 1170 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 200 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 341 posts.<\/p>\n

TopRankBlog<\/a>
\nRanks 1680 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 146 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 254 posts.<\/p>\n

ConversionRater<\/a>
\nRanks 8265 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 40 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 68 posts.<\/p>\n

AffiliateTip<\/a>
\nRanks 8438 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 40 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 64 posts.<\/p>\n

WhoIsAndrewWee.com
\nRanks 12688 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 28 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 31 posts.<\/p>\n

Jim Kukral<\/a>
\n26190 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 15 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 17 posts.<\/p>\n

PepperJamBlog<\/a>
\nRanks 27113 out of 1,844,043 sites
\nMentioned in 18 unique feeds.
\nMentioned in 21 posts.<\/p>\n

So does it mean that a “low” ranking on the URLFan scale means your site is “bad”?<\/em><\/p>\n

That’s hardly the case.<\/p>\n

Remember URLFan is primarily using RSS as the metric.<\/p>\n

If you’re not actively promoting your RSS feed, or pushing traffic into your list (like I do), then you’ll score lower.<\/p>\n

And remember too, that traffic quantity<\/strong> is not the entire picture.<\/p>\n

Traffic quality<\/strong> (the type of visitor you are attracting) is as and could be more important.<\/p>\n

I’d rather than 1,000 relevant and targeted visitors to my site, rather than 10,000 untargeted ones (who might come once and never come back).<\/p>\n

When planning your online marketing strategy, always look at the big picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, we know Alexa isn’t accurate, in fact it has a number of blindspots, but it’s a easily accessed public web metric. But for checking out the Web2.0-ness of your site, you might like to check out URLFan.com. What is URLFan? If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48],"tags":[272,682,681,1781,523,683,679,680,257],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}