I’ve written before about my interest in geeky stuff like the Alexa website rankings.  A fellow AIDS dissident turned me on to Alexa last year, using it to point out how many Dissident websites and blogs there are out there, and how favorably many of them rank, especially compared to those websites that exist solely to attempt to discredit AIDS questioners and rethinkers, aka Dogmatists.

Since then I’ve been tracking these websites of interest to AIDS dissidents and updating an Excel spreadsheet every few months.  Not that I don’t have too much time on my hands, but it isn’t that difficult or time-consuming to do if you find that sort of thing entertaining.

Here is how Alexa describes what their rank means:

The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to resistanceisfruitful.com and pageviews on resistanceisfruitful.com over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

In other words, Google’s Alexa rank is 1; Facebook’s is 2 and so on.  Another way to think about this is that there are 6,000 websites with more traffic than the site with an Alexa rank of 6,001.

So, The New York Times’ Alexa rank is 91.  The Weather Channel is 113.  The website rank for the city of Kansas City is 279,211, while that of my home town of  Colby, Kansas is 9,156,448.

Get it?

All of these are global rankings, which means they are based on total Internet traffic data collected from a variety of sources.  Alexa also breaks down the data for some sites according to country.

Below is a list of Dissident and Dogmatist sites, sorted according to the latest global rankings from Alexa (Dogmatist sites highlighted in yellow).  I am more than just puzzled that resistance is fruitful is currently the second highest ranked AIDS dissident website, and I’ll discuss why below.

It doesn’t take much Googling to find a lot of criticism about the validity of Alexa’s ranking, as well as some black hatters wanting to sell their supposed “secrets” for gaming Alexa’s system.  Alexa, which is owned by amazon.com, defends its methods, which they update periodically to stay ahead of the bad guys.

For the record, I have never contemplated, let alone implemented any illicit code or unethical strategies to artificially inflate my blog’s rank.  I have installed the Alexa toolbar in my Firefox browser; I include a link in my signature when I comment on the web; and I promote this blog to about 150 facebook “friends”, and as a bloglet on OpenSalon, where I started posting a year and a half ago.  The last thing on my mind then was being popular.  I was coming out of a pharma-induced haze and struggling through the consequences of dealing with more than a decade of severe medical and health problems.  I just wanted to tell my story.  Blogging was therapy.  If I’d only known then what I know now!

So, what is one to think of these rankings?