Afrigator seems to be quite fond of gymnastics in their rating of blogs.

Basically, The Gay Kenyan complained that one night he noticed that his ranking dropped suddenly into the fiery pits of Beelzebub. He went from 48th in Kenya to 271. He was deeply shocked by this. He is not the first or only person who complains about this. On the Blogs24 network, we’ve seen countless complaints.

Better I explain this, but before I do, let me say that they are not wrong. We’re not necessarily doing it right. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying there is not really a wrong or right. It is just the way we are doing it at the moment.

We’ve got an Afrigator ranking script that we run every 4 hours. (To find out exactly what the Afrigator ranking script does, see this post: Whats in an Afrigator ranking) Thus, every 4 hours, we calculate a new “score” or rank for each blog in our system. Effectively this means that the ranking can change every 4 hours!

In addition to that, we reset the Unique Visits and Page Views ranking every Sunday night round about midnight-ish. So, if you had a fantastic amount of visitors this week, next week they don’t count anymore as we start afresh.

In order to maintain a good ranking position, you need to constantly (at least on a weekly basis) have a steady flow of visitors to your site. If you have any suggestions regarding these processes, please feel free to tell us. We’re always open to suggestions! ;)

You would be happy to know that it is now built in. When you log in, you have the option to be remembered. If you select to use that option, you will stay logged in for a long, long time. At least until you log out again.

PLEASE NOTE:

• Do not use this function on a public computer! If you do, the next dude will have access to your Dashboard and who knows what clever things they’ll get up to. To be safe, remember your login credentials rather.
• Also, it will only work on the computer and browser you logged in from. We’re striving for brilliance, but we’re simply too human to have overcome that one! ;-)
• You will stay logged in for a couple of months. You might be logged out in the far future, fortunately if that does happen and you forgot your username and password, you can always have it reset by using the forgot password function.

Anyways, thought you should know! Its a stupid little thing really, which we should have implemented ages ago, just never did.

Us 5 Gator Guys uses Afrigator a lot. It makes sense since we spend most of our days and nights on it! Now what I’d like to know is how would other people feel about me, Mark, Mike, Lester or Justin being featured in the Top ranked blogs on Afrigator section. I’m totally conflicted since on the one side, I’d love to get plugs from my own product (and God knows, I do need it! :( ) and I am a blogger even though I work on Afrigator, but at the same time we’re less important to feature on there than YOU!

At the moment Mark, Mike and Justin feature in the top 20. So my question is, what do you feel? Is it okay or not? On the one hand, without our blogs there it wouldn’t be a “true and fair” reflection on who is highest ranked, but on the other hand we’re hogging up some space.

Disclaimer: I’m getting my narcissism back, so yeah, I’m jealous! :)

Now first off, let me state that there is in my opinion no right or wrong way of ranking sites. Every algorithm applied could be correct and if you’d ask the guys in the top 20, they’d favor the ranking system that they’re in, so this is not a debate of right or wrong, rather an explanation.

Amatomu goes about ranking their blogs purely on traffic. I.e. how much unique visits a blog gets.

Technorati gives you a rank based on links to your blog. The more links you have, the higher you rank.

At Afrigator we thought we want to make it a little more, uhm, interesting. Here is how we do it exactly:

First, we sort all blogs based on the amount of unique visits they got over the past couple of days. Then we assign a rank according to unique visits to each blog. For example (figures used are fictional in this example!):

We count the unique visits each site got the past couple of days:

iMod got 55000 unique visits the past couple of days.
Thought Leader got 45000 unique visits.
…my heart is in Accra got 43000 unique visits.
Black Looks got 42000 unique visits.

The effect is, according to unique visitors the above mentioned 4 sites are ranked:

iMod = 1st
Thought Leader = 2cnd
…my heart is in Accra = 3rd
Black Looks = 4th

Next, we do the same for page views, but lets imagine Black Looks gets the most page views:

Black Looks got 89000 page views.
iMod got 80000 page views.
…my heart is in Accra got 78000 page views.
Thought Leader got 69000 page views.

So according to page views, the sites are ranked:

Black looks = 1st
iMod = 2cnd
…my heart is in Accra = 3rd
Thought Leader = 4th

The next step we calculate, in a similar fashion to Technorati, the links to blogs from other Afrigator blogs. There are 2 types of linking we take into consideration:

1. Links from blogs
2. Links from blog posts

Let me explain what the difference is between the two.

Firstly, links from blog posts is simple. It is how many individual blog posts links to your blog, excluding your own posts. In other words, Mike links to my blog (or a post in my blog) in 5 of his posts. Justin links 10 times and Mark links 7 times. That is a total of 22 links.
Next we take links from blogs. In the above example, my blog is linked from 3 other blogs. I.e. I have 22 links from blog posts, but only 3 links from other blogs. Get the idea? Right, lets get back to our example.

The four guys get the following amount of links from blog posts:

Thought Leader has 255 links from blog posts.
iMod has 230 links from blog posts.
…my heart is in Accra has 190 links from blog posts.
Black looks has 186 links from blog posts.

This results in a ranking as follows:

Thought leader = 1st
iMod = 2cnd
…my heart is in Accra = 3rd
Black looks = 4th

We do the same again for links from blogs:

Thought leader is linked to from 57 blogs
iMod is linked to from 45 blogs
…my heart is in Accra is linked to from 37 blogs
Black looks is linked to from 35 blogs

Again, here is the ranking:

Thought leader = 1st
iMod = 2cnd
…my heart is in Accra = 3rd
Black looks = 4th

I just have to mention, links are only counted from other blogs being aggregated on Afrigator. If, for example, Techcrunch links to your blog, it won’t be counted as we do not aggregate them. ;-)

Right, now every blog has a position according to the 4 criteria mentioned:

iMod – Unique visits = 1st, Page views = 2cnd, Links from blog posts = 2cnd, Links from blogs = 2cnd
Thought leader – Unique visits = 2cnd, Page views = 4th, Links from blog posts = 1st, Links from blogs = 1st
…my heart is in Accra – Unique visits = 3rd, Page views = 3rd, Links from blog posts = 3rd, Links from blogs = 3rd
Black Looks – Unique visits = 4th, Page views = 1st, Links from blog posts = 4th, Links from blogs = 4th

What we do now is to calculate the average:

…my heart is in Accra average : 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 12; 12 / 4 = 3;
iMod average : 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 7; 7 / 4 = 1.75;
Black looks average : 4 + 1 + 4 + 4 = 13; 13 / 4 = 3.25;
Thought Leader average : 2 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 8; 8 / 4 = 2;

According to the average ranking, the sites are ranked:

iMod = 1st
Thought leader = 2cnd
…my heart is in Accra = 3rd
Black looks = 4th

And that, my friends, is the mystery uncovered. Pure rocket science, see? :P

If you go to the Blog stats page, you can see the ranking as per each of this criteria.