Details
The End of Pagerank
By Paul
Mar 15, 2016 pm31 10:58 PM
For the past decade plus, WSN has made use of google pagerank to give you and your visitors a quick indication of how popular the domain name a link comes from is. Unfortunately, google is no longer making pagerank accessible to the public in any way. Changes in WSN are thus necessary.
As a replacement for pagerank, I've decided to use alexa's site ranking. Alexa provides an esimtate of where a site lies on a list of the most popular websites, where 1 is the most popular and unpopular sites number in the millions. As of 9.2.47 Beta 1 you can show this rank number in a template using {LINKALEXARANK}. That number doesn't mean much at a glance though, so I've converted it into a pagerank-like 1-10 ranking (1 being least popular, 10 being most popular) with {LINKALEXAPOPNUMBER}. To show the pagerank-like bar image, use {LINKALEXARANKIMAGE} and it'll look just like what you're used to.
To make the transition easier, you don't have to make any template changes. If you leave your templates as-is, google pageranks will be displayed for domains where you've already fetched them and the alexa-based popularity bar will show on new listings where pagerank isn't available. The two improvements you'll get if you swap out your old pagerank template code for the new {LINKALEXARANKIMAGE} are tooltip text listing the exact alexa rank number and automatic hiding of the image when data hasn't been calculated for that domain yet.
Pagerank and alexa rank use different fields though, so you will have one significant problem if you don't update your templates: you won't be able to sort a category by pagerank, except for old listings that still have that data. For that reason, I'm automatically updating templates to swap the pagerank sort for an alexarank sort in the "Sort Links" template. If you have a customized theme where the sort options aren't in that template, you may have to manually update to change option="pagerank" to option="alexarank".
It's important to note that pagerank and alexarank sort in opposite directions -- lower alexa ranks are better whereas higher pageranks are better. If you default sort by pagerank descending, that will remain, but you'll want to update it to sort by alexarank ascending soon.
By Paul
Mar 15, 2016 pm31 10:58 PM
As a replacement for pagerank, I've decided to use alexa's site ranking. Alexa provides an esimtate of where a site lies on a list of the most popular websites, where 1 is the most popular and unpopular sites number in the millions. As of 9.2.47 Beta 1 you can show this rank number in a template using {LINKALEXARANK}. That number doesn't mean much at a glance though, so I've converted it into a pagerank-like 1-10 ranking (1 being least popular, 10 being most popular) with {LINKALEXAPOPNUMBER}. To show the pagerank-like bar image, use {LINKALEXARANKIMAGE} and it'll look just like what you're used to.
To make the transition easier, you don't have to make any template changes. If you leave your templates as-is, google pageranks will be displayed for domains where you've already fetched them and the alexa-based popularity bar will show on new listings where pagerank isn't available. The two improvements you'll get if you swap out your old pagerank template code for the new {LINKALEXARANKIMAGE} are tooltip text listing the exact alexa rank number and automatic hiding of the image when data hasn't been calculated for that domain yet.
Pagerank and alexa rank use different fields though, so you will have one significant problem if you don't update your templates: you won't be able to sort a category by pagerank, except for old listings that still have that data. For that reason, I'm automatically updating templates to swap the pagerank sort for an alexarank sort in the "Sort Links" template. If you have a customized theme where the sort options aren't in that template, you may have to manually update to change option="pagerank" to option="alexarank".
It's important to note that pagerank and alexarank sort in opposite directions -- lower alexa ranks are better whereas higher pageranks are better. If you default sort by pagerank descending, that will remain, but you'll want to update it to sort by alexarank ascending soon.
| Description | Switching WSN to an alternative domain popularity measure. |
| Views | 240 views. Averaging 240 views per day. |
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