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 using publicly available figures. How do websites get added to the list?

This methodology estimates the quality of websites. It is scientific in that it calculates valuation from objective metrics.

Two criteria are used for assessing online marketing success: Google PageRank and traffic. Then we aggregate them into a valuation figure.

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.

Traffic

This is the democratic metric. It assesses the number of people who are likely to visit the website next month. 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. The metric is not the Compete value. The Compete figures over the past year are averaged and trended so that an aggregate is built. A bonus is given to non-US sites so that the final figure shows worldwide traffic.

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. The public numbers and those of many other hosted blogs are very low because their traffic is not tracked independently of that of their platform.
There are two separate ways out of this problem:
- Get your own domain as Robert McIntosh did. This shows a long-term commitment to the site.
- Get liked by Google. This is the situation of the numerous sites currently showing in the ranked list.

On the contrary the same sites are favoured by the other metric (PageRank) 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!

The choice of only these two metrics is based on a previous study that evaluated all possible metrics for website appraisal.

Wrap-up

This methodology of PR + 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 website metrics, please share it by posting a comment.

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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.

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.