GPWA Web Traffic Rank - Anyone know more?

[davemerry]

I've just added my sites to the GPWA member portals sections and I've noticed that 'GPWA Web Traffic Rank' is used to calculate the order.

Does anyone know what factors are used to calculate this?

Cheers in advance

[TheGooner]

I'm not sure ...

Looking at tools like Alexa and Compete it seems to be broadly traffic based but the specific results are quite variable - my main site ranks in at #27 - but I'd suggest it has more traffic than half the sites ahead of it.

The ranking might be using a US-traffic metric that I don't know about - that could potentially explain the variance - as we have traffic from 170 different countries each month rather than a single country base.

[MichaelCorfman]

The ranking is intended to represent estimated relative traffic. We use several third-party sources of information that include both US-based and non-US based traffic to estimate overall traffic. Alexa is one source we use, and the only one for which we are contractually allowed to disclose a name. There are others where we are contractually prohibited from identifying the information source because our license for data use only allows us to used the data in constructing our own rankings, and does not allow us to attribute those rankings to them as the rankings we produce are hybrids which they do not want associated with their brand name.

The rankings should be viewed as a very loose guide to more popular and less popular sites. It is important to recognize that while there are good traffic ranking sources within a small number of specific countries, there are no good sources of global web traffic. So attempts like we make to estimate overall traffic from incomplete sources, each of which is subject to errors of its own, is by nature prone to quite a bit of inaccuracy.

We've also thought about using other very different sources of information to allow different sorts of rankings between sites. Personally, for example, I view seomoz site authority as being perhaps a better comparison stick between different sites than traffic rank estimates.

Michael