Is NHL now more popular than NBA, NFL, or MLB?
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
As we kick off the New Year, would it shock you to learn that hockey has overtaken the other three major North American pro sports?
And is just this wishful thinking from a lifelong hockey fan (that would be me) who really doesn’t care much about what happens in football, basketball, or baseball?
Far from it. In this case, I’m relying upon the collective wisdom of the world’s most popular search engine: Google.
Wired.com sums it up simply: “Google assigns a PageRank rating of 0 to 10 for every site it indexes. The ranking reflects the significance of a site as determined by Google — the higher the rank, the more popular the site.”
There’s been lots of talk about the shakeup that occurred in Google’s PageRank ratings in recent weeks, but who knew the NHL would come out looking so good as of January 1, 2008?
The PageRank for NHL.com is: 8
The PageRank for NBA.com is: 7
The PageRank for NFL.com is: 7
The PageRank for MLB.com is: 7
On the surface, it seems like a new-millennium version of the June 20, 1994 Sports Illustrated cover that accompanies this posting.
NHL.com actually has the same PageRank as Google’s own home page.
Boy, with Sidney Crosby scoring the shootout winner for Pittsburgh versus the Buffalo Sabres today in front of 71,212 fans at Ralph Wilson Stadium and a US-wide audience on NBC, NHL.com should be rocking a 9 soon.
Skeptics and curmudgeons may highlight the Alexa ratings as a counterpoint:
NBA.com has a traffic rank of 182
NFL.com has a traffic rank of 450
MLB.com has a traffic rank of 571
NHL.com has a traffic rank of 908
Well, boo to that.
But regardless, any tech-savvy readers who would like to offer a feasible explanation for NHL.com’s superior PageRank are welcome to chip in. Has the league’s move to embrace and promote new media, from fan forums to blogs, really paid off in such a big way?
HockeyAdventure.com brings you the best of Lucas Aykroyd's current blog entries and archived articles. Based in Vancouver, Aykroyd has written about NHL, international, and junior hockey for The Hockey News, The Sporting News, the NHL Yearbook, Rinkside, NHL.com, Eishockey News, and Prospects Hockey. As an editor and journalist, he has covered three Olympics, ten World Championships, three World Junior Championships, one World Women's Championship, and one World U18 Championship for IIHF.com and HockeyCanada.ca. He was one of 56 experts chosen to vote for the IIHF's Centennial All-Star Team.
No. 1 — January 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 am
Lucas,
As you may know, Pagerank is a function of several different things, but I certainly think that the NHL’s move to embrace new media and blogging certainly has an affect. Bloggers with higher pageranks who link to NHL.com certainly pass some of that link equity to the site. Furthermore, the internal linking structure of NHL.com allows for the site to share pagerank with itself.
Let me explain; the value of an internal link is the same as the value of an external link (proven through research). Therefore, when NHL.com links to itself it is passing some of that “pagerank” or “Google Juice” to the page that it links to. This is great news for NHL.com because it can now share that high pagerank with itself, compounding it’s benefits!
To explain your Alexa scores, I am not sure. The Alexa system is flawed by virtue of the visitor having to have the Alexa toolbar installed on one’s browser, so I really don’t give that system much credit when looking at sports sites. It is really only beneficial when researching more technical topics where the typical site visitor would be more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed.
No. 2 — June 13th, 2010 at 3:46 am
Good entry. That is what I am finding. Thanks again.