The September Biblioblog rankings are out:
| Rank | Blogger | Blog Name | Alexa |
| 1 | Jim West | Zwinglius Redivivus | 67215 |
| 2 | John Loftus | Debunking Christianity | 124171 |
| 3 | Joel L. Watts | Church of Jesus Christ, The | 128485 |
| 4 | Matthew and Madeleine | MandM | 149517 |
| 5 | Scott Bailey | Scotteriology | 173966 |
| 6 | James McGrath | Exploring Our Matrix | 202192 |
| 7 | Todd Bolen | Bible Places | 214428 |
| 8 | Glenn Peoples | Say Hello to my Little Friend | 232756 |
| 9 | Marc Cortez | Scientia et Sapientia | 239747 |
| 10 | Dan Wallace | Contra Mundane | 266076 |
The rest of the list is here.
Tags: Biblioblog · Blog Rankings21 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Hi, what does ‘Alexa’ mean?
Why are you not higher?
Alexa is a website that gives out statistics on other websites such as rankings and page views.
As someone still trying to crack the six figure mark, that’s quite impressive!
Alexa means the Alexa ranking which is used to score how read the Biblioblogs are.
The figure used is the 1 month figure which is said to be more accurate than the 3 month figure which shows up in the Alexa widgets you see on many blogs.
As for why we are not higher, aside from the fact that we score very high for a philosophy/theology blog, we are a New Zealand blog and not many New Zealanders use the Alexa toolbar, it is more of a US phenomena. So us scoring as well as we do is indicative of our fairly-reasonable-for-a-kiwi-blog number of US readers -10-14% – (which you can see here).
Of course if our regular readers were to install the Alexa toolbar, which only takes a second and then made sure they visited our site regularly with it on for the next month we would seriously shoot up the rankings…
Madeleine – you just illustrated how the Alexa rating gets manipulated! And only some of these sites included an Alexa widget – which I have found works wonders for Alexa ranking.
I also question your claim of greater accuracy for the 1 month – after all there is less data.
My own investigation shows that any individual ranking like Alexa is a poor indicator of visit numbers. Although one can improve indications by including other ranking systems like Technorati and google (I think I increased explanation of variation for Alexa of 30% to over 60% when I used 11 ranking systems).
To give you an idea of how meaningless the Alexa figure can be. Your quoted Alexa rank for 4 of these blogs is:
1: M&M
2: Bible Places
3: Say Hello to my Little Friend
4: Contra Mundane
For ranking of monthly visit numbers (these blogs had counters)
1: Contra Mundane
2: Bible Places
3: M&M
4: Say Hello to my Little Friend
I see, Cheers Richard P and Madeleine! Peace out
I suggest you get informed Ken rather than forming conclusions from anecdotal experiences.
The toolbar is the key. Alexa only measures through its toolbars. So it comes back to attracting and retaining visitors (who have the toolbar).
The one month stat is widely reported to be the more accurate figure – do some research for the reasons why instead of making assumptions.
The closer a site gets to 100,000 the more accurate Alexa becomes.
As for your actual visits based off counters can you check what the settings within each counter are set at on each site to define uniques? Some can be set to clicks on the site more than 5 mins old which could erroneously measure one person reading 10 pages as 10 uniques. Our counter is set to the longest time possible to try to truly record uniques but that was not the default setting… Not everyone even knows to adjust that or how it works.
I don’t run the Biblioblog rankings so it is not my call what they use but I can’t see them switching to your rankings in the near future sorry Ken.
Madeleine – I was only trying to help – and I have actually researched some of these areas.
Yes, we know about the toolbar. But the fact is (and others have commented on this) installing the toolbar improves your ranking independently of visit numbers. And (yes anecdotally) I found big improvements in Alexa rankings independent of visit numbers both when I installed the toolbar and when I added an Alexa widget to my blog.
My comments on the 1 month ranking was based on my own research with NZ blogs. The 1 month ranking did not explain any more variation in visit numbers than the 3 month, if anything less. That surprised me – because of the time periods – and I can only suggest it is due to to smaller amount of data used in the 1 month figure.
You say: “The one month stat is widely reported to be the more accurate figure “. Could you please provide some links to these reports. I have not seen anything checking this out myself. And I am certainly interested in following up any such assessment.
Yes, I am aware of differences in output for the different counters. My own research showed Statcounter and Sitemeter (the most frequently used counters by far) are quite similar. However, I think in the ranking system I have the difference in ranking (rather than raw numbers) due to the counter is quite small.
Probably the important criteria for choice of counter is the load time penalty each imposes. Bill Bennett is quite concerned with this and I think he may be checking it out.
No, my comments were not aimed at getting these blogs onto my own ranking system. Purely to demonstrate the huge difference in ranking produced by Alexa and visit numbers.
However, the NZ blogs in this list are already on the NZ Blog Ranking spreadsheet. So their relative performance can be followed there.
That’s a good question Goiiiis! It makes sense now. Shot for aksing it. BRo Ken just relax soleh, MandM are still doing good as I reckon eh. I’m gonna install that Alexa toolbar right now. You should do it too, you’re a regular.
I’m not that regular but I’m still gonna do it
Silio – don’t worry I am perfectly relaxed.
Just that I have researched this ranking business quite deeply so can see the problems with the ranking in this post.
And yes I do have the Alexa Toolbar as my comment made clear. However, I currently have it turned off as there are other ways of getting this information with less overhead. There are quite a few addons and scripts which enable one to automatically pick up information on blogs – Alexa ranking, Page rank, Google reader Subs, Technorati, Links, etc., etc. And I seem to have them all.
Unfortunately nothing enabling direct access to visit numbers unless counters allow public access. But someone’s bound to produce a script to do that some time.
Hey MandM, just another random question. Out of those 10 Blogs on the rankings, how many are from NZ? (Besides this one of course) Cheers.
Two are, number 8 is also written by a Kiwi.
Silio definitely do install the Alexa toolbar and then visit MandM daily – but by all means follow Ken’s lead and turn it off if you decide to go and visit his site…
…just turn it back on when you come back here.
😉
i dont know what the devil ken is talking about. first, i dont have any sort of alexa widget on my site. anywhere. care to explain that?
second. geesh.
Jim, go to the Alexa site and look for widgets. You will find the code to install on your blog.
Madeleine, you are obviously aware of how to manipulate Alexa rankings and why people are suspicious of them. However this doesn’t manipulate visit numbers hence they remain more reliable.
Incidentally, what about your links to the higher accuracy of the Alexa 1 month ranking. Still want to follow that up.
“i dont know what the devil ken is talking about.”
Quite a few people seem to suffer that problem around here.
thanks murph. that makes me feel less stupid.
ken, can’t add widgets to wordpress hosted blogs because wp doesn’t allow javascript on its servers.
so even if i wanted to, i couldnt. so- anyway- im #1 and i dont even have to cheat the system! HA!
Jim, if you look at my blog I have a few widgets including Alexa. These don’t use java script (I am also wordpress.com) So I am sure you can put them on you blog.
Remember, you may be number 1 now (congratulations) but Madeleine knows how to manipulate the system and she is ambitious!
Perhaps you should advocate for a rating based on visit numbers!
But then again perhaps such ratings don’t really bother you. Most people just aren’t worried.
The widget really does not do much and I wouldn’t bother with it if it was a hassle to install. The toolbar does way more and anyone serious about rankings and google placement should use it daily but attracting traffic, especially repeat traffic does the most and that is pretty difficult to “cheat.”
There is a lot you can do to position your blog so that people can find it but getting them to come back is all about content so that is where the bulk of your energy has to go.
Matt and I can produce content fine. That’s why despite our lite blogging we stay pretty high in most ranking metrics. Of course with the growth in our profiles, if Matt and I were blogging at the frequency we were last year we’d be doing a lot better in the rankings but we cannot maintain that at the moment due to life stuff.
As to my ‘ambition.’ It is enough for us that our material sits high in google. Anyone googling the topics we have written on will usually find our material in the first few results on google now so that is cool in and of itself as it means they are considering our material when they research a subject. This has led to publishing and speaking opportunities for Matt (and media ops for me) which has to help long-term with his employment endeavours (I’m kinda over the media thing so I’m less keen on that). Being the top blogger in a category or being ranked number 1 is just a means to those ends. Accolades and recognition are nice and all that but they are not why we blog – we have stuff in our heads that we want/need to share and Matt wants/needs to work in his field.
I agree Madeleine – it is all about content, or should be. That is why I think manipulation of Alexa is rather pointless.
However, one content you haven’t mentioned is that contributed by commenters. Your blog manages to produce controversial material, this invites comments and debates, and you have an open policy. You don’t inhibit that debate.
I am sure if you followed the daily average visits you would see that the traffic spikes occur when you have the active, some would say, raging debates. That has certainly been my experience on my blog.
Of course, one could wonder how valuable that traffic is when there are a lot of critics or trolls participating. Maybe its the silent lurkers who you really want to get through to with your message.
On the other hand (and this is something I often tell trolls on my blog) all this activity may in itself just be indicating more trolls and critics. But it has a long term effect of improving the Google search rankings which the critics and trolls don’t want but are contributing to.
Congrats MandM. I see you just might overtake me next month.
Good luck on that! It’s tough when you must moderate comments, since according to Joel Watts the rankings at Alexa are based partially on comment interaction.
But it’s definitely not based on whether we have Alexa tool bars located on our sites.
Cheers.
BTW: Matt will want to sink his teeth into my next tome when it comes out. I plan on keeping him busy:
https://sites.google.com/site/theendofchristianity/