I have only recently discovered Matt and Madeleine Flannagan’s site where they track the top New Zealand Christian Blogs. They use a very complicated algorithm including incoming links, posts per week, comments per post, etc. When I examine the actual visitor numbers of these top sites, however, I’m interested that unique visitors is in the 200-400 per day range. In the period they are analysing, my Liturgy site had an average of 1,524 visitors a day. I’m beginning to wonder: is this site New Zealand’s most visited Christian site?
It could very well be – keep upo the good work!
If it isn’t I’d be very surprised. It’s the only NZ blog I read.
I would say that your site is NZ’s most visited Christian site. Well done!
It’s the only NZ website I visit- that I’m aware of anyway. I’m in the US of A.
If you examine Ken Perots list of NZ blogs based on average daily unique hits you’ll see that you are probably top of the blogs he is listing.
http://openparachute.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/nz-blogs-sitemeter-ranking-%E2%80%93-january-%E2%80%9810/
As Ken concedes though only 145 of the 800 or so NZ blogs have open stats that he can use. If you look at Tumeke’s stats you can see that you would not be number 1 blog out of those 800 (his formula includes unique daily visits so you can work it out from that) you’d be around 5th-6th place going off his November stats which would make you number 1 most visited NZ Christian blog, even beating MacDoctor.
http://nzblogosphere.blogspot.com/2009/11/nz-blogosphere-rankings-november-2009.html
There is something to be said though for factoring in more factors than just unique hits. While I agree that that should be the primary basis for a ranking formula, some blog’s readership is heavily RSS feed readership which does not impact unique hits, others, such as the Beretta Blog and Podcast have a large following in the Itunes store via their podcasts and that does not show up in unique hits or RSS counts. Backlinks to content are another important measure, they show that a blog has relevant quality content.
Blogs with high unique hits might in some instances have used shonky marketing tactics to get themselves visitors to drive up their unique hits but those visitors are not reading the content, they are bounce hits who are on the site for less than 20 seconds so that is why some argue that number of comments speaks to the blog’s ability to engage the readers and RSS and facebook subscriptions, comments and backlinks again speak to that.
When someone is running a blog ranking factoring in a large percentage of the 800 or so NZ blogs they just can’t look for or check for cheating tactics – that’s why most blog rankers use formulae of some sort. At MandM we just average two other people’s results based of two sets of formulae purely on the grounds of laziness because basically I don’t have time to gather monthly stats of every blog and devise some formulae and many blogs have private hit counters so there is no way to know their uniques.
Metrics that I don’t think should be considered are Alexa ranking because it is so easily manipulated and documented as unreliable and the volume of posts a blog is putting out weekly as team blogs and blogs manned by the unemployed with no lives then have an advantage over blogs that might have better quality content.
All that aside your blog clearly has a large readership and they are here because they appreciate your content so well done. I really hope Tim Selwyn adds you to the Tuumeke list and Ken to his list so everyone in NZ can see a Christian blog ranked in the top 10 of all the various lists.
Hits are all about marketing and web presence. Through your Tweets, I link to your site at least once a week (to a mostly US audience).
Sharing the Good News circa 2010 is a whole different beast. Well done, Pastor!
If it’s not, it SHOULD BE!