blog.Cellarer

I have searched the web for sites about wine. I think I now have a pretty comprehensive pool (of 260 sites). Webmasters need not apply as the contest includes all sites. I display only the 120 ‘best’ — ‘best’ is evaluated with public website metrics.

So lie back, relax, and enjoy my comments on the results.

A comprehensive pool of candidates

I have expanded the set of websites that I retrieve metrics for. Their number has grown from 180 to 260 this quarter. This list cannot be the complete list of all the websites about wine but I propose that it is coming close.

Newcomers

Some sites are appearing for the first time. The highest ranked sites of these newly appeared sites (Avenue Vine, Jancis Robinson and Wine Review Online) are not new at all: they just were not known at the time of the previous website pool. This shows that this directory is an opportunity for everybody to discover websites (starting with myself).

Off-line support

You may notice that half the biggest websites are supported — and promoted — by off-line operations. They are Web appendices of successful non-Internet ventures: the Wine Spectator, The Pour, eRobertParker, Avenue Vine, Wine Enthusiast, Jancis Robinson, Natalie McLean.

USA dominates

The first 8 websites stem from operations based in the US. The majority of the listed sites are written from that country. The following facts may contribute: the USA are still the country the most present on the Web, they still dominate the english-speaking culture and they are on a trend to become the top wine drinking country in the world.

Foreigners

So here is a sample of excellent websites which have pure players (without offline operations) and not based in the USA:

• #9 The Winedoctor (England);
• #15 Spittoon (England);
• #26 Wine-pages (Scotland);
• #41 French Scout (France);
• #46 Burgundy-report (Switzerland);
• #68 Wino-sapien (Australia).

How to participate

Websites are automatically included in the contest as soon as I learn of their existence. To be eligible to the next issue of the Cellarer wine directory, the below conditions must be met:

1. The main topic should be wine.
2. Producing estates and wine sellers are excluded. Some of them run wonderful websites but the type of information is different.

If you disagree with the directory criteria, please comment below or e-mail me.

Once the above conditions are fulfilled the websites are considered for addition to a search engine dedicated to wine and food.

Here are the criteria I use for rating the sites. You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed on websites or by subscribing to the mailing list about website optimization.

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 blog.Cellarer

I have spent months searching the web for sites about wine. I think I now have a pretty comprehensive pool (of 180 sites). Webmasters need not apply as the contest includes all sites. I display only the 80 ‘best’ — ‘best’ is evaluated with public website metrics.

Herebelow is a story of the poll and an analysis of the results.

A comprehensive pool of candidates

I have expanded the set of websites that I retrieve metrics for. Their number has grown from 90 to 180. This list cannot be the complete list of all the websites about wine but I propose that it is coming close.

Better data

The number of processed sites has grown as indicated above. Furthermore two metrics were interesting but brought their own set of problems.

The value of traffic used to be clearly out of the mark. I have improved the metric by averaging, aggregating and otherwise correcting the data for all sites. The traffic figure is now increased (uniformly for all sites) so as to show an amount that is credible: the real (private) traffic figures are no extremely far from those publicly displayed.

The other problem was the variability of the backlinks metric. I could not relate it to the site profiles: a few notorious sites showed few links. So this metric is out.

Ins and outs

Some sites are no longer showing. In general this is not because they are lacking in any way. It is only because of the growth of the competing pool.

Other sites are appearing for the first time. The highest ranked sites of these newly appeared sites (Natalie, Free the grapes, the Doctor, Classic, Wines and vines, Ken’s) are not new at all: they just were not known at the time of the previous website pool. This shows that this directory is an opportunity for everybody to discover websites (starting with myself).

How to participate

Websites are automatically included in the contest as soon as I learn of their existence. To be eligible to the next issue of the Cellarer wine directory, the below conditions must be met:

1. The main topic should be wine.
2. Producing estates and wine sellers are excluded. Some of them run wonderful websites but the type of information is different.

If you disagree with the directory criteria, please comment below or e-mail me.

Once the above conditions are fulfilled the websites are considered for addition to a search engine dedicated to wine and food.

Here are the criteria I use for rating the sites. You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed on websites or by subscribing to the mailing list about website optimization.

Elsewhere

There is a complementary contest: the American Wine Blog Awards. It has a focus on US blogs and uses some subjective judgment by peers. The purpose is entirely different to that of the Cellarer ranking, which automatically includes all sites and is limited by publically available data (which mostly is not directly influenced by peers). The American Wine Blog Awards were published in March.

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 blog.Cellarer

I spent months reading websites about wine; I came to discover that there are a lot of them. Now I have assessed them and ranked only the 50 ‘best’.

Herebelow is an analysis of the results.

The big guns

The traffic levels are very much below those of mainstream operations.
Yet a few sites dominate the pack. This is partly due to their early appearance on the Web (Wine Spectator, Wine lovers page). It is also partially because they have the weight of an offline publication behind them (Wine Spectator, the New York Times, Wine Advocate).

The challengers are Vinography and Dr. Vino.

Diversity

In the last few years the web offer has immensely diversified. Everybody and their wine supplier now has a blog.
There now are many quality wine critics who comment on line. Some belong to the mainstream media, others not.
You can have your voice too and this is good for eveybody — except some big brands.
In this pack of numerous wine websites, however, some rise steadily by virtue of:

• producing consistently good content that people want to read;
• or being regularly cited by their peers.

Two consistent sites doubled their valuation this quarter: Wine weekly to #24 and Gollywinedrops to #42.

How to participate

For a website to be eligible to the next issue of the Cellarer wine directory, the below conditions must be met:

1. The main topic should be wine.
2. Producing estates and wine sellers are excluded. Some of them run wonderful websites but the type of information is different.
3. Either the PageRank is at least 4 or the number of visitors is at least 1,000 per month.

If you disagree with the directory criteria, please comment below or e-mail me.

Once the above conditions are fulfilled the best ranked websites are considered for addition to a search engine dedicated to wine and food.

Here are the criteria I use for ranking the sites. You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed on websites or by subscribing to the mailing list about website optimization.

Thank you for reading. Please comment.

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 blog.Cellarer

This is an analysis of the ranking of wine websites.

Analysis of results

Two websites clearly stand out as the biggest wine hubs: the Wine Spectator and the Wine lovers page. This in part is explained by their quality. It is also explained by the long time they have been known by wine enthusiasts.

Having an off-line reputation clearly helps. This is illustrated by the presence in the top five of the Wine Spectator, the New York Times and Robert Parker.

In the last few years the wine web offer has immensely diversified. There now are many quality wine critics who comment on line. The latest domain names listed are from 2006 and 2007:

• Behind the Vines
• Bigger Than Your Head
• French Scout

Actually I have examined some websites that do not appear in this top 50. They are not listed because the others are even better!

In general the valuation shows an institutional bias. This is why I computed a second metric: the website popularity. Please click on the ‘Popularity’ heading to sort wine websites by public support.

What trends can you see from the rankings?

How to participate

For a website to be eligible to the next Cellarer.com wine directory, the below conditions must be met:

1. The main topic should be wine.
2. Producing estates and wine sellers are excluded. Some of them run wonderful websites but the information type is different.
3. Either the number of visitors is at least 1,000 per month or the PageRank is at least 4.

If you disagree with the directory criteria, please comment below.

Once the above conditions are fulfilled the best ranked websites are considered for addition to a search engine dedicated to wine and food.

Here are the criteria I use for ranking the sites. You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed on websites or by subscribing to the mailing list about website optimization.

Thank you for reading. Please comment.

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Want more on these topics? Browse the archive of posts filed under websites.

 blog.Cellarer

I run a competition of wine websites based on the methods explained here. To find websites I’ll like, I follow websites I already like. This is not the point here. My contests attempt to be open, diverse and objective by not using votes but publically available figures. How do websites get added to the list?

The purpose of this study is to design a methodology that estimates the quality of websites. It is scientific in that it calculates ranks from objective metrics.

Website publishing agencies follow certain metrics. The 4 criteria explained here are used for assessing online marketing success: Google PageRank, inbound links, subscribers, traffic.

Then we’ll aggregate them into valuation and popularity metrics.

PageRank

PageRank has a patent by Google. It was supposed to represent the likelihood of a websurfer to stumble on a given web page.

In practice it is now correlated with the level of trust Google puts in the website domain. It is biased to older websites and big corporations.

Google also manipulates the public PageRanks for their corporate agenda. That makes at least two reasons why we should not limit ourselves to this metric. You can find details at a rant on Google PageRank.

Inbound links

In a certain way the webmasters ‘vote’ for pages by linking to them. So the links that point to a website can count as votes.

Update: I stopped using Yahoo! Site Explorer in April 2008. I found that this measure is unreliable.

For assessing a website quality we take into account the number of links that point to this website. The data comes from Yahoo! Site Explorer like so.
In practice a website shows incoming links of mainly one of three forms:

1. the links demonstrate the website authority;
2. the links show the website popularity among webmasters;
3. the links are created by the same webmaster.

Therefore this metric is essentially useful to counter PageRank.

Feed subscribers

An interesting measure would be the number of people who read the blog feed. This metric is restricted to blogs. Furthermore the available statistics are severely limited, unreliable and biased.

This amounts to several reasons why feed statistics are not used to build the Cellarer.com directory of the best wine websites or the Cellarer.com directory of the top 100 food blogs.

Traffic

This is the democratic metric. It assesses the number of people who are likely to visit the website next month. Update (on Andre’s suggestion in comment): these numbers are not taken from the webservers and therefore do not show the actual traffic.

This measure derives from the USA traffic levels measured by Compete.com. Update in April 2008: the metric is not the Compete value. The Compete figures over the past year are averaged, compensated and trended so that an aggregate is built.

The Compete figure is not available for sites that do not use their own domain name. Such sites are thus put at a disadvantage on this criterion. On the contrary the same sites are favoured by the two other measures since they receive links from well known platforms — which (usually) have nothing do to with the niche (food or wine). (Examples: the New York Times, Blogspot).

Valuation

The valuation is a sum (in USD) that the website could sell for. This is hypothetical: it is a value that would serve as a reference if the owner wanted to sell and if she negotiated with a buyer.

There are a lot of things to consider for assessing how much a website is worth. Most of them are not public information: the revenue, the number of subscribers and registered users.

Cellarer.com calculates the valuation by aggregating two metrics: PageRank and traffic. Eh! we have just done bulk site appraisal!

Popularity

Update: I terminated this test in April 2008. I found that this aggregate is unreliable.

Many websurfers read top 100 lists to learn of a website they would read. They will probably not use most pages of the website. The popularity metric is an attempt to show how useful or entertaining each page in the website is. It is calculated by taking a measure of user interest (incoming links and traffic) and substracting a measure of the publisher size (PageRank). So popularity shows public support as opposed to institutional strength.

Wrap-up

This methodology of PR + links + traffic is used to assess websites related to wine or food. Here is the directory of the best wine websites.

Follow up

You can follow the directory evolution by subscribing to the feed of website articles or by subscribing to the mailing list of comments available below.

If you have a different view on webiste metrics, please share it by posting a comment.

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By this post I am launching a contest.

My goal is to build a parade of wine websites — sorted by quality.

You can participate by e-mailing me for a website you like by Wednesday 7th November. A condition is that the site primarily talks about wine.

Cellar.com proposes a search engine dedicated to wine and food. The wine websites selected for the search engine are also candidates to ranking as best wine sites.

Wine producers and wine sellers are excluded. Some of them run wonderful websites but there would be too many candidates.

Here are the criteria I use for ranking the sites. You can follow up by subscribing to the feed on websites .

Update: the results are now available.

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