About Ranking.com - Is this Traffic Ranking Site Bogus?

Updated April 2004 

You may already be familiar with Alexa that attempts to rank all the websites on the world wide web according to their traffic.

There's another traffic ranking website at TrafficRanking.com (officially named Ranking.com). They claim to rank the top 750,000 websites on the Internet.

The rankings are generated through the users of the 7Search toolbar. Like Alexa, you will have to take Ranking.com's rankings with a huge grain of salt as they are not accurate and are based on the toolbar downloaded by users.

The information provided by Ranking.com is hardly statistical and seems to based on guesses, rather than technology. If you take a look, you'll see the visitors, visits and page views stats don't seem to change much as you move down the rankings.

Okay, I can accept the inaccuracies of traffic reporting. This type of technology will always be limited in its effectiveness unless the whole world downloads the darned toolbar...but here is the big problem:

Ranking.com CLAIMS to Report a Websites Trustworthiness

Through its partner site, Trust Gauge they also add a little graphic depiction of how trustworty your site is. How can they report a site's trustworthiness without thoroughly investigating it. Be sure to check your site, you likely won't be too be pleased with your trustworthiness score.

Here's a little meaningless info off the Traffic Ranking site:

 

Quote from Traffic Ranking: 0 Not rated site; insufficient info to be assigned a score 1-2 Lacks most basic contact information; lowest score 3-4 Basic information provided by this site; somewhat trustworthy 5-6 Site provide detailed information; moderately trustworthy 7-8 Significant amount of info provided; considered trustworthy 9-10 Substantial info provided; recognized as "very trustworthy"

Of course, Ranking.com offers you the option of submitting information about your site. I actually tried several months back, but the confirmation email was never sent to me. Now, I don't really care...because I think this ranking scheme is garbage.

If a company is going to claim to gauge the trustworthiness of websites, they could at least have the decency to do it properly and not rely on the submissions of webmasters who probably don't know about this obscure service...who don't want to shell out the cash it will take to get a good ranking (more on this later).

You can go to Trust Gauge and find out more details about the trustworthiness ratings. They are actually more detailed than the above chart, but still have some questionable factors to help determine ratings. Site are rated out of a possible 100 points and then that number is divided by ten to give the trustworthy ranking. Factors include:

- Brick and Mortar Location for People to Visit - You get extra points for the brick and mortar on top of offering a postal address. How discriminatory is this against home business?

- Toll-Free Phone Number - What makes a toll-free number trustworthy? Really? It's good customer service, but what does it have to do with trust?

- Secure Billing Pages - You get extra points for this, but what if you don't take orders on your website? I guess you are S.O.L.

Okay...so the above factors could be argued...but these are going to blow you away...

- Tons of Extra Points for Having a Good *Traffic* Ranking - If you rank well (I mean REALLY well) for traffic, you will get a boost to your trustworthiness. First of all, Traffic Ranking cannot claim any accuracy in their ranking (one of my sites gets about 50 visitors a day and is ranked in the top 6000, while this site receives in excess of 2500 visitors per day and has a ranking the 40,000s).

But most importantly, what does traffic have to do with trustworthiness? There are some pretty darned busy scam sites that will automatically get a high trustworthiness rating because of this. Perhaps, Ranking.com & Trust Guage figure the top sites will have good lawyers and the funds to sue them...so they don't want to step on the toes of any big guns.

- Register with Their Partner "Validated Site" and You'll Get a Big Boost - Validated Sites get a bonus 55 points, automatically bringing your score to 7 or 8. If you are registered with BBB Online or some such organization...you'll only get about an extra 5 points.

And no, the Validated Site service is not free. And if you don't want to get too annoyed, I suggest you don't look at their Rate Chart. Here's some info anyway:

There is a registration fee. It costs $50 if you are in the US or Canada. However, you can expect to pay an extra $40 if you live elsewhere. Then, they charge a yearly fee...and here's a kicker...

THEY CHARGE YOU MORE THE HIGHER YOU RANK ON THEIR BOGUS TRAFFIC RANKING SYSTEM! Expect to pay anywhere from $120 - $2600 each and every year, depending on how well you rank. If you have a higher traffic ranking...you pay more.

In Summary ---> If you don't rank high on their Traffic Ranking site or don't register for their service...you won't likely see a Trustworthiness rating of higher than 3 or so.

Ah well...Traffic Ranking has been around since 1997 and hasn't seemed to hit the mainstream. For the sake of all website owners, I hope that it stays this way.

Anyway, I understand this company is trying to make money and that's the reason for setting up the service...but when a company reports us as site with little to no trustworthiness (without any investigation)...that is just plain wrong.

If it makes you angry, I hope you'll join me in demanding that Traffic Ranking removes your site from the listings. I just sent my email to:

Info@TrustGauge.com 

I'll let you know when I get an answer.

Update April 28, 2004: I have received a reply and the gentleman has gone into a lengthy explanation of why his service is valuable. But then he tells me that I cannot be removed from the database.

Patrick Devereaux says:

"Your original request to have your websites removed from our database cannot be granted. It wouldn't work. As soon as a BrowserAccelerator user visited any of your websites, it would just appear again."

Now, I haven't written back because I am digesting all this and deciding on my next step...but this makes me even angrier. If they are going to use automatic querying or robots to gather information across the net, they could certainly obey a robots.txt file or something of the like. When I'm ready to speak with Mr. Devereaux, I will ask. He continued his email with:

"Also, please look at it from our side. You have seen fit to use your Internet forum, from which you have a rather large audience, to evaluate our websites and services and to speak disparagingly about them. We see fit to use our Internet forum to evaluate your websites and rank and rate them based upon our criteria. "

Their criteria of ranking is based on who pays them money or ranks in the top 100 sites. It's so very wrong.

I welcome your comments and feedback.