Comments on: Metrics of competitive webmastering

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:21:13 +0000

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By: Dylan Bozeman

Dylan Bozeman — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:47:07 +0000

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By: Epic Directory

Epic Directory — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:20:12 +0000

Very nice article. I to do not agree with what Google chooses as pagerank. I mean some sites that are dedicated to the content they provide will only have a pr of 7 while some sites that have virtually no content but a lot of traffic will have a pr 9. Pagerank is highly over rated but we are stuck with it.

By: Andre Ribeirinho

Andre Ribeirinho — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:00:03 +0000

Hi Estelle,
I think making a list like this is always interesting so that you can take a different overview of the wine world site.

Regarding the traffic numbers I agree with Ryan that this might be misleading to potential advertising clients. I think you could include a more clearly visible note (maybe below the “Monthly traffic” tile) stating that these are numbers that might not be correct because they are not provided by the sites themselves.

Cheers,

By: Estelle Platini

Estelle Platini — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:44:22 +0000

Ryan,
Thank you for your private email and this comment. I understand your concern. Indeed it will not happen that all wine websites agree.
So we have a problem: you don’t want inaccurate figures to show up and I would like to show a measure of user interest. I’ll think it over and in the next weeks I will try to obtain traffic figures from some webmasters.

By: ryan

ryan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:05:50 +0000

As I said in my private email, the numbers you quote are drastically wrong. They may be fair as they relate to each other, but they are very wrong in terms of overall traffic across the the wine bloggers world/wine website world. Therefore why wouldn’t you just list a list of wine ranking, as others do, so as not to cause a problem.

I really don’t want to see the wine world represented this way with numbers that are wrong. Oh and Compete may be full of professional’s but they are wrong too!

Unless all wine websites felt there was a benefit to including a counter for each one to track traffic with, something that will never happen, it cannot be fair to list “false numbers” about any sites. No matter how innocent they may seem, they could do more harm then good.

By: Estelle Platini

Estelle Platini — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:02:13 +0000

It is possible that Spittoon “should” be slightly lower with respect to its authority. A way to achieve this is to put less weight on the traffic metric. I will try such a move for the next issue.
More generally such a “system” can only be suspect in so far many bloggers will have opinions on it. I propose that the skew of the traffic metric counterbalances the skew of the other 2 metrics (PR and backlinks).
In other words excluding traffic would be unfair to the reader interest.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:57:58 +0000

Estelle, I would reckon that there are all sorts of reasons the stats are wrong – not systematic across all sites (like underreporting a type of visitor that would be common to all sites). In fact, it is to do with redirects, shared domains, etc. and therefore they are likely to be wildly innacurate and variable. I think I’m with Ryan in saying that unless it can be proven that it is fair to all, it probably shouldn’t be included.

Also, we should apply some common sense to the results too.

Any “system” that values, for example (and nothing against Andrew of course), Spittoon.biz above WineLibrary.tv must be somewhat suspect, no?