The Top Nine Social Networking Sites

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Q: Who was the pitcher to pitch the only perfect game in the World Series?
A: Don Larsen, October 8, 1956, as the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2-0.

I've seen a few compilations on this subject, but the methodology in some cases seemed either flawed or not objective enough (surprise), so I though it would be useful to conduct my own research piece. If you take the "authority" approach on this, it makes it a lot easier to rank these various sites and eliminate the vast majority since they simply aren't strong enough to appear on the radar.

Basically I got lists of networking sites and did a Google PageRank on all of them. Everything below PageRank 7 was thrown away. That narrowed down the field to 9 sites (boy, that part was easy!). Then, I got the Quantcast.com visitor counts and the Compete.com visitor counts. Then I compiled a composite number of inlinks for each site. Finally, I got the Alexa rank for each.

What I did then was to try and come up with a "fair is fair" composite number that indicated the authority and value of each site. I added the inlinks, the Quantcast, and the Compete totals. This was then divided by the Alexa rank (divide, because the lower the Alexa number, the stronger the site). Then the computed result was multiplied by the PageRank to get a final "score".

One could certainly make the case that using Google PageRank to eliminate contenders has its flaws, but since Google drives up to 90% of search traffic, and since the SERPS (search engine results position) of what you're searching for is so much determined by PageRank, I felt it was, at the least, an educated starting point.

As can be seen in the table below, digg.com is the clear leader, with del.icio.us running a close second place. Technorati is actually a much stronger contender than I thought it would be. And, for example, while Slashdot sports a PageRank 9, its composite number just doesn't add up to make it even into the top 5.

Now, you may ask, "How can this help me"? Well, from an SEO standpoint, these top 9 sites represent the vast majority of "link juice" you can get. So if you focus on submitting and getting your "Stuff" - your articles, your site, your blog -- into these 9 and forget about the others, you are going to make your SEO optimization job one heck of a lot easier. You'll get a lot more "bang for the buck". Also, it makes it much easier to track where your referrer traffic is coming from.

In fact, I like this "short list" so much that I've put together another one of those "Social Link This" apps, a link to which you can find at the bottom left of each post on this UnBlog. There's a javascript "bookmarklet" for it that you can drag to Bookmarks or Add to Favorites. Using the page or the bookmarklet from your browser, you can submit your blog post, article or site to all nine of these top contenders in less than five minutes and get some serious link juice!

I present the sorted result for your viewing pleasure:

SITEINLINKSCOMPETEQUANTALEXAPRSCORE
digg.com11779608316964445870000098811711064
del.icio.us1715930511699128130000024885632006
Technorati.com753064373231709140000021682960672
StumbleUpon.com1905017713135866952393008561573
Bloglines.com507179483826631037118539540257
Netscape.com2158160048552328180175559441971
reddit.com4530757712264673443838527385151
Slashdot.org135550357244242698845799226156
Furl.net49595144148975575474112896890

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2:10 PM

    The other thing to note is that the quality of traffic from such sites may leave much to be desired. Take a look at http://whydiggisblocked.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg2:45 PM

    Do you really believe this hogwash? This is a rogue individual who has a vendetta, it is not representative at all of normal kind of traffic you would get.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:30 AM

    Very useful chart! Thanks for putting it together (and the little js progy).

    ReplyDelete

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