WEBSITE ANALYSIS
By Ben Best
We all know how Ben likes to crunch numbers. He must have stayed up late a few nights working on this.
There has been some confusion about some of the
data presented below, in particular the website rankings. The websites with the
LOWEST numbers have the HIGHEST rankings. Thus, the CNN (Cable News Network)
website has a rank of 35 compared with the Cryonics Institute website which has
a rank (today) of 980,445 (3 month average).
All of the data I presented
about website hits and popularity are RELATIVE. Alexa gives rankings but does
not give absolute numbers. To get absolute numbers I currently only have access
to my own website (http://www.benbest.com/) and the Cryonics
Institute website (http://www.cryonics.org/).
For the
week of 6-Dec-2006 to 12-Dec-2006 my website had 41,677 unique visitors and
55,706 page views, meaning that most of the people visiting my website only
looked at one page. This is the Christmas season, so my Christmas page is
getting the most hits. In fact, one-third of the page views on my website (which
contains over 200 pages) can be attributed to three pages (which are not
directly related to cryonics):
During the same period the Cryonics
Institute website had 8,533 unique visitors and 15,841 page views, meaning that
the average person visiting the CI website looked at about two pages. The most
popular search term leading to the CI website is "transsex". Entering this
search term into Google:
http://www.google.com/
results in the
online version of the fifth chapter of Robert Ettinger's MAN INTO SUPERMAN
The second most popular search term for CI is "cryonics" (CI first in
Google, Alcor second). For the week in question "transsex" resulted in 333 hits
and "cryonics" resulted in 253 hits. The third most popular search term is
"Cryonics Institute", which only resulted in 42 hits. That was followed by
"cryogenics" (38 hits) and "immortality" (26 hits).
The most popular
text page on the CI website, by far, is the main page http://cryonics.org/ followed by the fifth
chapter of MAN INTO SUPERMAN. After these the next most popular pages
are:
http://cryonics.org/prod.html
http://cryonics.org/reprise.html
http://cryonics.org/reports/ACDC_Thumpers.html
I was somewhat mystified by the popularity of the Thumpers page until I
did some investigation and discovered that nearly all of the people going to
that page got there by doing an image search on the term "ACDC", which brings
one of the photos up on the second page of a Google image
search:
http://images.google.com/images?q=ACDC&svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&start=20&sa=N&ndsp=20
About 80% of people going to this page stay less than 5 seconds (94% less
than 30 seconds). I have just done some comparisons on the rankings of cryonics
organizations and selected other cryonics websites on the world wide web. I
compared both search engine results and website rankings. As of November 26,
2006 my findings are below.
SEARCH ENGINE
RESULTS
According to
SearchEngineWatch.com, in July 2006 users of Search Engines in the United States
predominantly used Google (43.7%), Yahoo (28.8%) and MSN (12.8%), totaling 85.3%
of all web searches:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156431
I examined these three search engines to compare top 20 returns for
cryonics organization websites as well as cryonics pages on my own website
(http://www.benbest.com/) plus CryoNet and
Wikipedia (I ignored "sponsored links")
GOOGLE SEARCH (http://www.google.com/)
(1 & 2) Cryonics Institute (http://www.cryonics.org/)
(3) Alcor
(http://www.alcor.org/)
(4) Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics)
(8) CryoNet (http://www.cryonet.org/)
(9) Ben Best
Cryonics FAQ (http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html)
(12) The Cryonics Society (http://www.cryonicssociety.org/)
(14)
Timeship (http://www.timeship.org/)
(16)
Cryonics Europe (http://www.quantium.plus.com/lr/cryonics-europe/)
(17) American Cryonics Society (http://americancryonics.org/)
(19) Ben
Best Cryonics Topic
Index
(www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryonics.html)
(20) Cryonics Society
of Canada (http://www.cryocdn.org/)
YAHOO SEARCH
(http://search.yahoo.com/)
(1 & 2)
Cryonics Institute (http://www.cryonics.org/)
(5)
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics)
(6
& 9) Alcor (http://www.alcor.org/)
(7 & 8)
Cryonics UK (http://www.cryonics.uk.com/)
(11 &
13) Cryonics Association of Australia
(http://www.cryonics.org.au/caa/)
(14)
CryoNet (http://www.cryonet.org/)
(16 & 20)
The Cryonics Society (http://www.cryonicssociety.org/)
(17)
Ben Best Cryonics the Issues
(http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryiss.html)
MSN SEARCH (http://www.msn.com/)
(1) Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics)
(2 & 3) Cryonics Institute (http://www.cryonics.org/)
(4 & 5)
Alcor (http://www.alcor.org/)
(6) CryoNet
(http://www.cryonet.org/)
(8 & 14)
The Cryonics Society (http://www.cryonicssociety.org/)
(13)
American Cryonics Society
(http://home.jps.net/~cryonics/whatis.html)
(15) Ben Best Cryonics FAQ
(http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html)
(16) Ben Best Cryonics the Issues
(http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryiss.html)
(17 & 18) Cryonics UK (http://www.cryonics.uk.com/)
WEBSITE RANKINGS
ALEXA is an
AMAZON.COM creation that tracks and
ranks websites according to traffic. These results can be found by typing URLs
into the search box at http://www.alexa.com/ (use the "Traffic Rankings" tab, not "Web
Search"). It is only possible to search for rankings of domains (main pages),
not specific pages within websites.
Traffic Rank according to Alexa is a
3-month aggregate geometric mean of Reach (percentage of all users visiting a
particular site) and Page Views (number of unique pages viewed per day by users
on a given website). The top three ranked websites are Yahoo, MSN and Google, in
that order. Wikipedia is number 13, Amazon is number 19, CNN is number 34 and
AOL is number 41. (For the Global top 500 websites by Traffic Rank
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none)
Ben Best www.benbest.com/
235,037
Alcor www.alcor.org/ 432,343
CryoNet www.cryonet.org/
937,291
Cryonics Institute www.cryonics.org/ 961,944
Cryonics UK
www.cryonics.uk.com/ 2,291,287
Timeship www.timeship.org/ 3,612,594
The Cryonics Society www.cryonicssociety.org/ 3,827,853
American
Cryonics Society americancryonics.org/ No Data
Cryonics Society of Canada
www.cryocdn.org/ No Data
Cryonics Association of Australia
www.cryonics.org.au/caa/ No Data
My own website comes out on top, but only a small
percentage of traffic goes to the cryonics section of my website, so my high
ranking is not very useful from a cryonics point of view. I think the problem
with the American Cryonics Society is that it has only recently gotten its own
domain – operating before under
Using www.americancryonics.org/ also gives no data. Using www.cryonics.org.au/ for Cryonics Association of Australia gives no data as well. My best guess is that the ones with no data have such a low traffic rank that they are not recorded.
I apologize to the KrioRus people for
neglecting to include their website
(http://www.kriorus.ru/english.html)
in my comparisons. I have just checked Alexa
for the KrioRus website ranking
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.kriorus.ru%2F
and see that it currently
has a rank of 2,103,684 among websites of the world. This is higher than the
rankings shown for the Cryonics Society, and Timeship and just above the rank of
Cryonics UK!