FAQ for Top 100 Personal Finance Blogs Rankings

Related to our traffic based rankings of Top 100 Personal Finance Blogs.

1. Qualifing criteria for a site to be considered for ranking?
   » Must be a blog.
   » Must be active i.e. have at least 6 posts in last 3 months. Inactive blogs will not be included in our master list.
   » Should have a monthly traffic of at least 2000 unique visits.
   » Blog's content should fall into one or more of these primary categories - Personal Finance (PF), Frugality, Investing, PF Taxes and PF Deals.
   » Should have trackers for Sitemeter and Quantcast.
   
   
2. What's an individual blog?
   An Individual Blog is one whose content is written by the owner (one person) of the blog. Occasional posts from guest writers is okay for individual blogs. Couples' blogs fall into the category of "Individual Blogs."
   
   
3. What's a group blog?
   A group blog is one whose content is being written by a team of writers (more than one writer) on a regular basis. Blogs employing staff writers will be considered as team blogs.
   
   
4. What's your "master list?"
   It's a list of all blogs that are considered for generating our list of Top 100 Personal Finance Blogs.
   
   
5. How to submit a blog for inclusion in master list?
   Before you submit your blog please make sure it meets our qualifying criteria. Make sure that your site has relevant trackers for quantcast and sitemeter.
   
   Next, kindly check our master list to see if your site is already included. If not, then please contact us with the following:
   
   • blog name and url
   • google page rank
   • sitemeter traffic url
   • your contact email id (so that we can notify you when our Top 100 PF list is updated)
     
   
   
6. How to send sitemeter's data to improve your site's rank?
   If your sitemeter data is private, no worries. Before we start crunching data to generate our list, we will send out an email to all bloggers (on our master list) requesting a screen shot of requisite sitemeter traffic data.
   
   

Footnotes & Observations
+ View Notes - Jan 2010
New Implementations!
1. We've spent countless hours in diligently checking each site on our master list of over 850 sites to verify if they meet our qualifying criteria. It was a major shake up which has streamlined our master list from over 850 sites to about 147 individual blogs and 43 group blogs. Since this was major upgrade there is a possible scope for errors. If your site qualifies for this list and we've missed it, then kindly resubmit it.

2. Check out our new FAQ.

3. We've noticed that a lot of blogs have private sitemeter trackers. For our next rankings we'll implement a new feature for gathering sitemeter traffic data. We expect your cooperation since it will help you improve your site's rank.

4. For our next rankings we will check if a blog has trackers for sitemeter and quantcast. If not, it'll not be considered. We need data from all 3 sources for preventing our list from getting skewed.
+ View Notes - Oct 2008
There are some discrepancies in Quantcast and Compete's results. This may be due to the fact that many sites have not implemented requisite trackers and plugins.
For example, The Wisdom Journal (FIRE RANK: 86) has a Compete Rank of 9 while a Quantcast rank of 121. If Quantcast's script is implemented then this site can climb up into the top twenty slots.

» We noticed a manipulative trend whereby site owners (with highest traffic rank via Compete) removed their quantcast trackers and made their sitemeter data private so that they are evaluated solely on their Compete ranks. This is an unfair practice. If we find many sites following suite we'll have to enforce the presence of a quantcast tracker as a necessary condition for a site to be ranked in this list. We appreciate your cooperation in keeping this ranking fair and clean.

» From Oct 2007's rankings: One may notice inconsistencies in the traffic data from three different sources for a particular blog. For example:
Blog Sitemeter Quantcast Compete PageRank
AllFinancialMatters 49505 5297 17980 5

We may wonder about the reasons behind such discrepancies. Quantcast's traffic data in the above example, comes with a warning message at the top of the page which says:

"We have sparse data about allfinancialmatters.com, so these are rough estimates. Get Quantified to see more accurate results"

This implies that the site in question has not implemented Quantcast's script for collecting data. So the traffic data generated by Quantcast is a projection based on its approximation algorithms.

Of course, it is possible to improve the accuracy of these data. For that, we simply need to add the relevant tracking scripts or plugins (from Quantcast) to our blog's templates. However this is a matter of choice for each individual blogger. At present professional rankings for websites are being increasingly based on data from Quantcast and Compete.
+ View Notes - Sep 2007

In Sep 2007 rankings for pf blogs, many had raised a question about the authenticity of Quantcast's data. If you have been following recent trends in web rankings then you will note that Inbound Links, Quantcast, Compete and Alexa are used to rank sites having monthly traffic in millions! Perhaps it would serve a site well to go ahead an implement proper tracking by Quantcast to remain game to the changing metrics of website evaluation.

» Compete does not provide data for blogs which do not have a private domain name.

» Some of you had left your urls for sitemeter (invisible to public). When we tried to access them to get your sitemeter's data, we were requested to provide a user name and password! Consequently we could NOT retrieve sitemeter's data for such blogs.