Wicsi (beta): The Wichita Web Site Index
2 wichita is all about local Web content. To that end, our bookmarks do a fine job collecting and organizing local content. However, it leaves us wondering, which sites are most popular to Wichitans? What blogs do people visit the most? Who is rising and falling in the local Webscape?
Our bookmarks won’t answer these questions. We need a whole new system to identify and track top content providers in the area.
Our solution is a local Web measurement/ranking system we call Wicsi, the Wichita Web Site Index.
Who’s In the System?
Local sites with Wichita-related content of clear interest to Wichitans. We don’t follow paid-inclusion directories, link farms or scraper sites.
Presently, the index contains over 1000 local Web sites. After ranking them all, we break them down to these ranked categories.
- Arts and Entertainment
- Blogs
- Non-retail businesses
- Education
- Restaurants and Bars
- News and Media
- Retail Shopping
What We Measure
Roughly speaking, our formula is: Popularity + Importance + Subjective Factors = Final Score
- Popularity - Using diverse public and private traffic data sources, we track the number of users visiting local Web sites.
- Importance - Link quality and popularity (backlinks). On the Web and within our index.
- Subjective Factors - About 5%–10% of final score. There are a number of “judgment calls” that need to be made when identifying top local sites. We look at things like how often the site is updated and if information is useful, clear and easy to find.
Score/Rank
All indexed sites are given a final score between 0 and 10 (10 is best). This score is used to rank all the sites in the index and within their respective categories.
Note: This system is based on Internet-wide metrics and can be used to rank any site on the Web. There are no 10’s, 9’s or 8’s in a market of Wichita’s size. Popular local sites have a score of around 5 or 6, with an average of 3.5 for the top 200.
Factors that Boost Scores
- Backlinks from major search engines
- Backlinks from other sites in Wicsi
- Backlinks from the top 50 sites in Wicsi
- Registering a score (any score) on public ranking system
- Unique daily/monthly visitors as reported by public and private providers
- Google PageRank (the public one) historical, not real-time
- Frequent updates
- Usability
Dampening Popularity and Importance
We correct for local interest factors by dampening scores on certain sites. For example, sites like Boeing, Coleman or WSU have large Web audience outside the area. They may attract local attention, but clearly are not as popular to Wichita Web surfers as scores suggest. In this particular case, we use methods to “handicap” these sites commensurate with the amount of outside traffic.
Double Check
After we produce a rank and score for a local site, we check our work against an assortment of public rankings and metrics. Variance is analyzed and resolved if possible.
What does 2 wichita do with all this?
- Share It - 2 wichita is here to be a tool for local bloggers and other independent content providers in Wichita and South-Central Kansas. We freely share information to help them get acquainted with their Web surroundings and maximize their local reach and influence. (Bloggers— Contact Us)
- Make Content - We periodically publish “Top 10 Lists” in various categories.
- Make Maps/Links Pages - We developed a visual Web Map of Wichita based on this data, and will continue to update it based on usage and index trends.
- Good Old-Fashioned Exploitation :) - Tracking all sorts of Wichita-related Web sites helps us help local businesses and adds unique value to our unintrusive advertising model.
