There’s a more recent is listing here
Top 30 Sydney Food Blogs
By Thang Ngo
As of today, there are over 802 registered Sydney food blogs on Urbanspoon. While they compile a “Leaderboard”, as John from he needs food blog explains, the Urbanspoon Leaderboard “ranking actually has nothing to do with a bloggers popularity… The more people click on the Urbanspoon restaurant page that you have your review on, the higher you go up the list. Nothing to do with with your blog or its popularity”.
He quotes from Kate, an Urbanspoon spokesperson: “Our blog leaderboard calculation is actually simpler than you’ve been guessing: It’s a sum of page views in the past 30 days for every restaurant you’ve reviewed. It was intended to be fun, so we didn’t put the time into constructing a more complicated algorithm.”
Of course, the only accurate way to measure a blog’s popularity is by collecting actual traffic data, however, at the moment this is not publicly available.
So noodlies has compiled a list of the Top 30 Sydney food blogs (as at 7 July 2013) using data from Urbanspoon, Google and Alexa.
Congratulations to Lorraine Elliott, her popular blog, Not Quite Nigella is the #1 ranked Sydney food blog.
How does this ranking work?
It’s a four step process, conducted on Sunday, 7 July 2013:
- Select the top 50 Sydney food blogs according to Urbanspoon’s Sydney food blog leaderboard
- Google “Sydney food blog” and select blogs from the first five pages (50 results)
- De-duplicated Urbanspoon and Google lists to get a combined list of 68 food blogs
- Used Alexa to find the “World Rank” of each blog, the lower the rank the greater the estimated traffic numbers and higher ranking on the Top 30 Sydney food blog list
Note:
- Does my bomb look big in this? is an established and popular food blog. However, its blog platform, livejournal, is not ranked by Alexa and so it’s not included in the above list.
- Taking on board Simon’s comment, I’ve added his lower Alexa ranking
- Taking on board Shez’s comment, I’ve added her blog onebitemore.com and rasberricupcakes.com – and extended the list beyond 30
- Added Cook Republic, Addicted & Consuming, Inside Cuisine blogs to the list.
What is Alexa?
Alexa is a data company owned by Amazon. Alexa traffic estimates based on a panel of millions of internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions. From the panel each website in the world is given an Alexa Traffic Rank, it’s a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. According to Alexa: “The rank is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1”. Facebook currently holds the #1 Alexa Traffic Rank, followed by Google.
Of course, Alexa only estimates website traffic and while there are limitations, even detractors concede it “is the most widely known website-traffic tracking site on the Internet” and while traffic estimates may be in question, there is general agreement that as a raking tool, it has merit “Many people get confused as to the true purpose of Alexa, it is primarily a COMPARISON tool, it does an OK job of comparing how your websites are measuring up against your web competitors sites”.
Also, as it’s a relative ranking tool, if the ranking for one website is 500,000 it doesn’t mean that double the traffic numbers of a site ranked at 1,000,000.
And the future?
Based on your feedback, noodlies is keen to add more blogs to the list with the aim to produce the most comprehensive list of all Sydney food blogs. More details soon…
What do you think?
As bloggers, blog readers, marketers, PR and brands – do you find this Top 30 Sydney food blog list useful? What else can we do to improve on it?
Leave a comment to make a contribution…
you’ve put 13 Belly Rumbles http://bellyrumbles.com/ and 14 Ramen Raff http://bellyrumbles.com/ 🙂 Needs to be http://ramenraff.blogspot.com.au for Ramen Raff. great to be on the list although you only have 29? but you said 30. by the way if you search http://simonfoodfavourites.blogspot.com.au rather than http://simonfoodfavourites.blogspot.com my Alexa Traffic Rank is 1,109,680
Thanks Simon, I’ll revise
I like the intent behind what you’ve done, but I think the method of finding the “list of 68” is a little bit lacking. If a blog isn’t associated with urban spoon, or hasn’t aligned it’s seo to feature the words “Sydney food blog” (which, due to the specific nature of seo means that a blog ranking highly on “Sydney food reviews blog” or “Sydney food blogger” might not be on that list) it won’t even make the first round cut.
By way of example, the very well known raspberricupcakes, who has an Alexander rank that would place her third in the above list, isn’t mentioned at all. Similarly, my blog, which ranks higher than some listed, doesn’t get a mention.
There are a number of blogs that have a very thorough list of blogs in Australia and the city from which the bloggers are from, perhaps if this exercise were repeated, it might be worth starting with a fuller sample size?
this is a very good observation. urbanspoon is more associated with blogs that include restaurant reviews but negates the many fine blogs that are more recipe based. i think this list it a good start but could somehow include a wider blog inclusion of well known and active food blogs that might be missing. possibly more factors might be required than just alexa perhaps. http://Food.invesp.com/ uses a number of different factors to work out their listing. i think a top 50 might be good.
Thanks Shez for the feedback, I’ve added both your blog and raspberri cupcakes to the list, thanks.
raspberri and shez blog links need to be live links. at the moment it’s just text. thanks for adding http://simonfoodfavourites.blogspot.com.au BTW my alexa seems to be 1,107,732 not 1,547,757? 🙂
Ooops you’re right, will get it fixed tonight
hi noodlies, you might need to double check a couple of stats
http://www.thescreamingartichoke.com is Alexa Traffic Rank: 17,167,629
and ramenraff.blogspot.com is Alexa Traffic Rank: 9,281,037 or ramenraff.blogspot.com.au Alexa Traffic Rank: 5,266,898
Great pick up, thanks Simon, just fixed
keep the great work up. i’ve been curious about a listing using Alexa so i’m glad you’ve had the time to actually put one together. i wish there was some way of having a real time listing so you wouldn’t have the need to update manually. i wonder if there’s any clever techies out there that can create one with the addition of a twitter listing. i think this would be a great directory for PR and bloggers to refer to.
Thanks for this article. adjusted my site accordingly based of what I read; and set up alexa so this has been kind of useful. considering months of site stagnation [due to some hokey wp bug and getting demotivated to restore the missing posts (til I met simon+sara), I think my blog is now doing okay] – I lost a fair few posts between november 2012 to may 2013) . The archives post illustrate this. Missing 6+ months. Anyhow, I get good hits daily now and also backup regularly.
my website never had the “sydney food blog” written anywhere – it used to say “food odyssey travelling outspace/feeding the innerspace” but I just changed it. For eg. I see that Noodlies hover tab says “noodlies sydney food blog – sydney food blog”. twice.
I guess a lot of it is working the metrics/SEO to get you hits. My blog is also only food/resto reviews/no recipes… the sydneycool site is more like a lifestyle thing than just a strict foodblog. So it’ll track hits from all sorts of things.
anyhow:
Jugernauts.com is now:
JUGERNAUTS : SYDNEY FOOD BLOG: WINE AND DINING MY WAY AROUND THIS PLANET
“Jugernauts Sydney Foodblog: A Sydney Food blog + Diners Guide”
tagline which you get if you hover over a tab : “#foodie #eating #wining #dining #foodblog #jugernauts food blog sydney”
some of that stuff is invisible anyhow but it was good to think about this.
Sad to hear you lost posts, how frustrating. Thanks for pointing out the double up of ‘sydney food blog’ I reckon I’d get penalised for that.. now I just gotta find out how to fix it.. arghhh.
When I converted from blogspot to wordpress I think I lost rankings, but I reckon they come back after a while if you blog at least frequently. Good luck Bob!
Did you also make sure to not be logged in with your google account or have the setting disabled that has google modify your search results based on history? If not, your resting results can be heavily skewed.
Hey Simon, yep, I cleared cookies and logged in as private browsing
Resting? That was meant to be search.
What would also be an interesting metric is age or length of time these blogs have been running, just to see how quickly some blogs have been able to build their rank.
Interesting work indeed! The Urbanspoon leaderboard really ranks restaurants, not bloggers and this shows a big difference.
Hi Alison, re the length of time to build rank, v good, point, though prob more work than I can put into it.
Yes, it’s not perfect, but the differences are v interesting.
length of time added to table sounds like a great idea 🙂
What a clever fox you are, and hats off for all the trouble you’ve gone to!! I had never heard of Alexa before so I’m quite chuffed to have learnt something new. Very interesting post indeed.
Good to hear, Tara, and congrats
Wow, this is good stuff Thang! Though no method is perfect, especially with SEO magic, it’s good to observe another type of ranking that’s not based on Urbanspoon ranks. They’re not exactly reliable, though do contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts in terms of CPM.
That said, wouldn’t it be nice if actual traffic data were available? And more so, how much of that traffic is actually “engaged” traffic. But that’s a problem for Alexa to figure out.
Keep up the good work!
you can always see my pageviews per month on my blog for some traffic data. i think most blogs don’t show it but i don’t mind.
Thanks Michael, I reckon there’s no point in chasing SEO, regular, engaging posts over a few years should do it 🙂
Wow – seems like so much work went into this Thang! Well done…and a very nice thing for you to do for your fellow bloggers (not that I understand it all of course cos I’m a spaz when it comes to stats)!
It was a little bit of work, but now it’s up and going, hopefully future runs should be easier 🙂
This is fascinating. I love stuff like this. Thanks Thang for all your hard work in putting this together.
And of course thanks to all the hard-working Sydney food bloggers for doing such great (and popular) work.
Thanks for the feedback, yes, it’s a little bit of work, but I’m thinking of a more comprehensive list of several hundred sydney food blogs (hopefully). Stayed tuned, will publish in Aug.
Surely there’s better things to do in life – like eat!
Oh, I eat plenty, Alison, think of this as my exercise! lol
Interesting list and method 🙂 Looks like it may be time to finally link up w Urban Spoon however with mainly recipes I’ll be in the same position I’d imagine! Haven’t checked my Alexa ranking in a while, will need to take a look…
Hey darling, you’re on the list now, will publish the full list in Aug 🙂
This is a brilliant idea- great list.
Greetings! I know this is kind of off topic but I was wondering which blog platform are
you using for this website? I’m getting fed up of WordPress because I’ve had
issues with hackers and I’m looking at options for another platform. I would be fantastic if you could point me in the direction of a good platform.
Every time I see this truck, I have to buy one for me and one for a friend. If I’m too full, I’m taking it home with me. Steamed vs Baked. I’ve tried the items steamed but enjoy the ingredients a lot more on the bun. It just seems to bring the flavors together cohesively a lot better.
Thanks for share this great list.
Great list, Love reading these blogs. Thanks for sharing.