I was curious to see how Hackernoon currently compares to most crypto news sites, considering more and more people end up posting articles to Hackernoon that relate to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in general.
For this comparison, we utilize Fresh Index from Majestic, simply because it shows us the most recent data.
Lets dive right into it
The first thing we notice is that most of the crypto news sites score poorly in terms of the TF/CF ratio, while Hackernoon is doing amazingly well, same for bitcoin.com and bitcoin.org. In terms of referring domains, IP’s, and subnets they all score pretty well.
Most of the sites have a large amount of Dofollow links, as you would expect from sites that command a large amount of traffic. On the other hand, smaller sites score worse, which is no surprise due to budget constraints, which consequently makes it harder for them to acquire credible links.
You can clearly see that Hackernoon is doing extremely well, especially for a site that barely existed two years ago, kudos for that.
There is one thing that bothers me about this comparison, and that is the TTF category: Science or better said “Social Sciences” according to Majestic.
How can it be that Coindesk, NewsBTC, CoinTelegraph, and both bitcoin domains score extremely high there, while CCN which is the same type of site scores extremely low here? Is there a conspiracy going on between the former sites or is it because CCN is using a repurposed domain with a much older pre-existing backlink profile?
You tell me!
Another interesting thing to note is that nearly all crypto sites aren’t related to News at all. Additionally, most legit news sites don’t want anything to do with them…which raises eyebrows.
Still, Google ranks them in the News category, so they clearly know what those sites are all about. When we talk about legit sites, you could say Hackernoon is a lot more legitimate in the regular news world.
Let’s see what SimilarWeb has to say:
Traffic stats provided by SimilarWeb.com
Hackernoon clearly beats its crypto competitors at all fronts. You can say this isn’t a fair comparison as Hackernoon is about more than just cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, which is amazing for such a young site.
This comparison also clearly shows that TF ranking isn’t everything in terms of traffic, considering bitcoin.com and .org are much stronger in terms of link strength.
As for traffic, all the crypto sites have seen their traffic almost halved in the past six months while Hackernoon has been quite stable. I have to admit that SimilarWeb isn’t always 100% reliable in reporting traffic, but for a comparison like this, it works well enough.
Well done Hackernoon!
Glossary
Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF)
TF and CF are metrics for analyzing the strength and quantity of links. Ideally, you would like these to be in the ratio 1:1. If CF is twice the TF, it indicates the domain is receiving a ton of spam as compared to legitimate traffic.
Referring Domains, IP’s and Subnets
Referring domains are the number of websites that link to you. You also need to look at the IP addresses and subnets the links are hosted on. Some websites like to leverage this by hosting 1000 websites on the same server.
Topical Trust Flow (TTF)
This is a measure of how close you are to the most trusted websites in almost one thousand categories as cited from Majestic.
Dofollow Links
When a link is placed on a site, it’s automatically termed a Dofollow link, which means that Google passes the juice/strength from that backlink. Spammy domains tend to have a high amount of no-follow links; such links are most often ignored by Google.
References:
How to Rank on Google - The Ultimate Guide_First things first, Google doesn't rank websites, it ranks pages, and the number one ranking factor for pages are…_www.contenthourlies.com
Using Majestic Citation Flow and Trust Flow to check the Quality of your Link Prospects -_This article is mainly aimed at the agency world where there are outreach or link building teams working full time to…_blog.majestic.com
Desktop and Mobile Web Traffic for Any Website_As more and more people consume digital content through desktop and mobile devices, analyzing websites through both…_www.similarweb.com