We have attempted to “rank” the blogs by 3 main metrics:
1) Strength of site as a whole
2) Social Reach / Following
3) Estimated traffic
A rank of 1-100 is awarded for each metric per site which is then totalled as a final figure to determine ranking.
Strength of site
We have used “Domain Authority” as our metric of site strength. (see here for further details)
Domain Authority is Moz’s calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google’s search results. It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against.
It’s best to use Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) as comparative metrics when doing research in the search results and determining which sites/pages may have more powerful/important link profiles than others. While specific metrics like MozRank can answer questions of raw link popularity—and link counts can show the raw quantities of pages/sites linking—the authority numbers are high-level metrics that attempt to answer the question, “How strong are this page’s links in terms of helping them rank for queries in Google.com?”
Social Reach
The relative “strength” of a website while helping it gain search engine traffic is not an indicator of the sites popularity or scale of reach. We have therefore factored in the following of each website by looking at the big Social Platforms. Namely:
1) Twitter2) Facebook
3) LinkedIn
4) Google +
We have then gotten these figures and ranked by way of cumulative total.
Caveat here is that we have only used sites social profiles which were apparent when visiting their site.
Estimated Traffic
While there are different data sources such an Quantcast and Compete to estimate site traffic they are more US inclined. We have therefore opted for Alexa Data for a more global view. If the traffic level is coming as a N/A we are scoring the site 30/100 as a minimum.
The global traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. The rank is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.
Conclusion
We admit the methodology is far from perfect, it fails to account for RSS Subscribers and social profiles that are not on the sites. However it is difficult to determine these factors with any accuracy.