When we launched the Majestic Million on a public beta, we had a simple mission – to determine if referring domain count was a viable measure of a websites popularity. Whilst there were one or two anomalies, at the start the data appeared to provide an illustration of how referring domains may be representative of a domains popularity.

We have kept our eye on the statistics, and have watched as a number of new entrants have climbed the charts, despite not being household names. Whilst from an academic perspective, we have found these results interesting, we questioned the relevance of a Majestic Million based on referring domain count.

We have had a few lively discussions on what alternative measures could be used for calculating the Majestic Million, and we think we have found an interesting alternative metric to simple referring domain count. Lets see how our previous top ten have been affected…

  • www.co.cc was 1st, now 1206th
  • www.co.tv was 2nd, now 1141st
  • ok.net was 3rd, now 1484th
  • oyun.ok.net was 4th, now 1509th
  • facebook.com was 5th, now 2nd
  • adhood.com was 6th now 1615th
  • google.com was 7th now 1st
  • twitter.com was 8th now 4th
  • t-online.de was 9th now 23rd
  • navigationshilfe1.t-online.de was 10th now 27th

So some significant movers – lets have a look at the new top ten following the change…

  1. google.com
  2. facebook.com
  3. adobe.com
  4. twitter.com
  5. youtube.com
  6. microsoft.com
  7. blogspot.com
  8. wikipedia.org
  9. yahoo.com
  10. maps.google.com

Hopefully this new top ten provides confidence in our motivation and justifies our decision to switch to this new metric.

So how did we do it?

We wanted to keep things simple, so decided to use an existing figure in our backlinks database. We considered using simple IP counts to limit the influence of huge numbers of domains hosted on the same computer, potentially by the same company, but decided to use “Class-C Subnet” statistics.

We appreciate that this blog is read by a wide audience, so if “Class-C Subnet” is a little too close to techno-babble for comfort, a simple description is an address range of servers which are often close to each other – either by geography or organisation. Technically, we are referring to a /24 subnet.

This appears to add a smoothing effect to the backlink data which results in what we feel is a more relevant popularity indicator, we hope you agree.

Steve Pitchford
Latest posts by Steve Pitchford (see all)

Comments

  • Dixon

    If you would like to attend a Webinar to see more about using Majestic Million, we have a free one next week. Sign up at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/448308128

    June 26, 2011 at 10:31 am
  • Ehsan

    Makes much more sense, good call.

    July 7, 2011 at 7:42 pm
  • iDCx

    So…. When are the next webinars Majestic?

    Any running in July per chance??

    Cheers, – Like the new Millions – I guess your quality score is as good as they come in link building – any chance of defining a few factors you use to draft points/ scores? 😉

    I ran a few queries the other day – a site which had been online since 1998 (with 233 backlinks) and a site (same niche) which had been online since 2008 with 10000 backlinks – guess who got the better millions score (10k links) but guess who ranks a couple of placews behind them for most terms – the 233 – yet no millions score – i guess link volume is built into your metrics… which now thinking about – makes sense as this is what you do – link volume.

    ooh i have a new t shirt slogan for you now…

    thanks majestic!

    DC

    July 8, 2011 at 1:01 pm
    • Dixon

      Glad you are liking it all! ACRank is actually pretty transparent: http://www.majesticseo.com/support/glossary#ACRank

      July 11, 2011 at 5:18 pm
  • Jose

    Is there a recording of the webinar? I got there too late :/

    July 8, 2011 at 2:21 pm
    • Dixon

      It wasn’t my best effort! So I won’t be leaving a record of it for prosterity I am afraid. In July/August I have quite a bit of travelling to do (including holiday) but we should have a new training video live instead.

      July 11, 2011 at 5:20 pm

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