Good news if you use Google Gadgets – Supernifty’s Site Ranking is now available as a Google Gadget.
So you can keep track of your website’s popularity right from your home page.
Learn more about site ranking, or go check out the Site Ranking Google Gadget.
Supernifty is pleased to announce a new service that enables website owners to keep track of their website’s popularity.
Alexa assigns a world ranking to all the websites on the Internet, however, they only keep historical data for the top 100,000. So if your web site is outside the hallowed few, you can easily lose track of how your site has progressed over the weeks.
Supernifty’s Website Ranking Tracker can do this for you. Once you’ve signed up, Supernifty will check your website’s ranking every day, enabling you to easily see how your site performs over time.
You can also download all historical data, for further analysis.
If you’d like to see how your site is faring in its journey towards world number 1, try it out.
It’s free for a month, then if you wish to continue using the service, upgrade for a very affordable fee.
How great are our paralympic athletes? Their efforts at the Beijing Paralympics have been incredible. Their stories, hardships and sacrifices have been at times heartbreaking, but more often inspirational.
In short, it’s been very good.
Further to Supernifty’s map of Olympics medallists, Supernifty is proud to announce a similar deal for the Paralympics medallists.
Using this map, you can see where all our local heroes hail from. If you’re considering setting up a tickertape parade, rock concert or air-force flyover in their honour, this is a chance to check that you are in the right town.
OK, so that last paragraph was sheer silliness.
But you should check out where our Beijing Paralympics medallists come from.
The map will be updated daily as more medals are won, until the conclusion of the games, so feel free to check it frequently.
Alexa is a company that provides a world ranking for all websites on the Internet.
I love this idea.
When I played a lot of tennis I often wished that I could have a world tennis ranking, so I would know how many tennis players I still needed to overtake in my quest for glory.
I imagined a weekly notice from the tennis officials, telling me, Congratulations, your ranking has increased 143,643 places and you are now ranked 8,200,505th in the world.
Unfortunately, world tennis rankings don’t go past 2,000 so my dream of a world tennis ranking remains a dream. Not so, however, the almost as exciting dream of a world website ranking.
Alexa provides toolbars for popular web browsers. Install one, and Alexa will start telling you the ranking of every website you visit, while also adding your browsing habits to its statistics.
There are, of course, many problems with this method of ranking web sites, in particular, webmaster oriented sites get a huge advantage, but I prefer to ignore these trivial weaknesses, and instead concentrate on watching my website climb the rankings, pushing aside less awesome sites.
I’m not sure if visiting your own website yourself adds to your Alexa stats, but just to be sure I tend to visit Supernifty at least 1,000 times daily.
You should do the same. Visit Supernifty that is, not your own undeserving site.
The main problem with the Alexa ranking is knowing what a ranking really means. To help out on this, Supernifty has put together a simple table for evaluating your website, based on its Alexa ranking.
Simply look up your ranking, then check it against the table below.
| Ranking | Evaluation | |
|---|---|---|
| 15 million | You don’t even visit your own website? That’s embarassing. | |
| 5 million | OK, so now you’re visiting your own site. | |
| 3 million | Your Mum has also seen your website. | |
| 2 million | Your Mum has a dog, it likes to surf the net. | |
| 1 million | Your family and all family pets clearly are visiting your site. | |
| 500k | Your site is officially proper*. | |
| 200k | Your site is officially pretty good*. | |
| 20k | ur site is beats lolcats.com. | |
| 5k | Congratulations! You are more popular than Hillary Clinton. | |
| 1500 | Time to run for president. You just passed Barack Obama. | |
| 3-100 | To reach the coveted top 100, your site will need that something special. If you’re not a mega software company, or owned by Google, your site must contain at least one of the following: social networking; zillions of sites combined; porn; illegal downloads; or image/video sharing. That’s a tip for reaching the top 100. | |
| 2 | You are God | |
| 1 | God has an Uncle? |
So now you know how good your site is, and by extension, how good you are.
* Supernifty certified. Stickers available on request.
If you are using MediaWiki as your CMS, you’ll need to ensure robots.txt is configured correctly on your site.
Search engines don’t like seeing duplicate pages, and if you don’t configure robots.txt, MediaWiki will give the search engines exactly that, via its “random” and “search” functions. This can lead to your pages being incorrectly marked down, or not indexed at all.
To prevent this from happening, create a file, robots.txt, with the following content:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wiki/Special:Random Disallow: /wiki/Special%3ARandom Disallow: /wiki/Special:Search Disallow: /wiki/Special%3ASearch
where wiki is the directory of your MediaWiki installation.
Place this file in the root HTML directory of your web server. You can verify that the file has installed correctly by visiting http://your-web-server/robots.txt.
This fix prevents your MediaWiki based web site from being marked down incorrectly due to duplicated content.
Supernifty uses MediaWiki as its CMS. There are many advantages to this arrangement, mainly the simplicity of use, and the advantage of a familiar Wikipedia style interface for users.
However, there are disadvantages. One being that there is no way to include custom meta tags in your wiki pages. Also, there appears to be no way to make the title that appears in the title bar different to the heading that appears at the top of the page.
META tags: All the SEO guides mention them. Although historically they were quite important, their relevance now is debatable. But, you never know. Some search engines still look at them, in particular, the description meta tag.
Title tag: Search engines look at this. So, you want a descriptive title, but not necessarily a huge headline on your page. By default, in MediaWiki the title in the title bar is the same as the title on the page, and the title in your URL. Bummer.
A MediaWiki extension was written to address this problem. Install this extension, and you can set:
Yeeha!