DomainRank goes where traditional firmographic data often falls short, with coverage that includes organizations of all sizes and anywhere in the world. In addition, the algorithm is peer-based, it’s not traffic-based or sampled. Website owners determine relationships between domains, and the resulting network topology determines domain significance and the influence conveyed by specific relationships.

DomainRank scores can be used to compare the relative influence of domains. For example, Facebook has a score of 0.0151. Twitter’s score is 0.0075, about half as much as Facebook’s, indicating they are half as influential. These scores are based upon the strength of inbound links each of which has its own score, thus DomainRank quantifies the importance of linking relationships.

Key differentiators between DomainRank and other website popularity resources such as the Alexa Top 1 Million

Alexa has indicated that they are shutting down the Top 1 Million domain ranking service.

Ordinal ranking vs. logarithmic scoring

The graphic shown below is a sample from January 3rd, 2022. This ranking shows that google.com ranks higher than youtube.com — and that is all.

Is google.com ten times more popular than youtube.com? 12% more popular? It is impossible to know based on an ordinal ranking. In contrast, DomainRank contains the logarithmic score for each domain (the ordinal rank is also provided), so by comparing the two DomainRank scores, you can see the precise difference in the rank. A DomainRank file sample from January 2022 is shown above.

There is a 2.6 difference in the DomainRank™ score between google.com and youtube.com. The way this difference works for DomainRank™ is that every 5 point difference is a doubling of influence and popularity. What this means, is that google.com is about 50% more influential a domain than youtube.com. This provides more insight than merely stating that google.com is #1 and youtube.com is #2. There are direct links and indirect links leading to a domain. More weight is given to those domains that have higher quality domains leading to it relative to other domains.

Additional Key Differentiators
The Alexa Top 1 Million panel consists of an unknown number of users who have installed a web browser extension that tracks which sites have been visited. This is adequate for website popularity at the user level. In contrast, DomainRank identifies the global linkage across all websites, including more obscure domains that are typically not entered into a browser. These domains are enormously influential because millions of high-quality domains link to them. For example, DomainRank lists t.co as the 28th most influential domain on the Internet. Tens of millions of websites have pointers to this popular Twitter domain, but it is not a popular web destination for Alexa users or the general public. Alexa Top 1 Million ranks t.co at #1386 (January 2nd, 2022).

Stability
The Alexa Top 1 Million file changes dramatically every day. While the top 1000-ranked Alexa domains are very stable, about 50% of the total domains (long tail) in the Alexa file are absent the next day. Over the course of a week, only about 200k domains remain consistent. Over a month that number drops a bit more and stabilizes around 180k consistent domains monthly. DomainRank is updated monthly, however, over time the list becomes much more stable. Over the course of a month, the DomainRank top 1 million domains are 95.3% consistent and over a year, 74.2% consistent. The DomainRank 5 million domains are 70% consistent over the course of a year. By comparison, the Alexa Top 1 Million is about 18% consistent over the course of a year.

Stability is important in time series analysis and predictive analytics. The massive fluctuations of the Alexa Top 1 Million domain set reduces it’s viability for time series modeling and large scale predictive analytics. It also calls into question the size of Alexa’s browser plug-in user base.

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