VFR is the 71st most popular conservative website

A correspondent told me that Intellectual Conservative has a list of the 100 most popular conservative websites, and that VFR is 71st. I thought that was impossible, but checked it out and indeed it is so. Rachel Alexander, who compiled the list, based it on the rankings at the Alexa site, where a search for View from the Right or amnation.com turns up a ranking of 301,593, the same number that VFR has in Intellectual Conservative’s listing. (An erroneous link to another site, ViewFromTheRight.com, has been removed.)

Another oddity: Alexa’s popularity rankings are based on computers that use the Alexa software. How reliable can such a sampling be? It would be like determining the most watched tv shows by attaching a meter only to Panasonic television sets. As an example, some sites that should be on the IC list are not there, such asJihad Watch , which surely has a larger readership than VFR. (However, perhaps Miss Alexander hasn’t listed Jihad Watch because she agrees with my frequently stated view that Robert Spencer is philosophically a liberal—joke.)

Still, this is great. Most of the conservative sites in the top 100 are well known magazines and organizations. VFR is a one person website, with less frills than a monk in the Egyptian desert, and I also have no mainstream outlets for my articles to help me draw in readers.

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Last night I asked Rachel Alexander some of the same questions I raised in this post, and she wrote back:

Wikipedia does a great job of explaining how alexa determines the ranking of websites.

I can tell you right now it’s not based on unique visitors, because I know someone who jacks up his ratings constantly by surfing his own website frequently. I don’t even get that benefit since I use Mozilla Firefox (with no extensions) which doesn’t track my visits, not Internet Explorer.

Alexa ranks ALL the websites in the world, on any topic, so if you site is ranked 301,593, that means there are 301,592 websites in the world that get more traffic than yours. When I first found out about alexa a few years ago, my site got down to 40,000 in its rankings. Since the internet has grown, my site has slipped to past 400,000. However, it’s still relatively the same placement among conservative websites.

And you are right to criticize its validity—the problem is it’s the best ranking system out there right now. You can check out trafficranking.com and others, but their methods are probably worse.

I’m not horribly skeptical, because I’ve been heavily involved in websites for years now (I run some anonymous local political blogs, and I also help manage websites we run at work), and have been able to compare the actual numbers of visitors to sites with their correlating alexa ranking, and it’s always proven quite accurate.

Matthew Bracken (author of Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista) writes:

Congrats on breaking the top 100!

“VFR is a one person website, with less frills than a monk in the Egyptian desert, and I also have no mainstream outlets for my articles to help me draw in readers.”

No, you only have the power of superior ideas concisely communicated, and a small army of internet foot soldiers who plug and link you where they can.

Well done! You are making a difference.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 01, 2007 01:34 AM | Send