For marketers and SEOers, monitoring website rankings is a regular job. And for many years, the most popular tool to help us do this is Alexa. However, Alexa was recently discontinued. So are there any reliable tools that can help us track website rankings? That is Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings, a new tool that was recently released by Cloudflare at the end of September.
What is Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings?
Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings is a tool used to track the rankings of domains over the Internet. It is developed by Cloudflare - the most popular CDN in the world. The purpose of this tool is to help you see how popular a website is based on the number of visits to the website. It allows you to track website rankings globally and by country.
The special feature of Cloudflare is that it only counts visits from real users, not visits from bots. Therefore, the data is quite reliable and useful to users when used to analyze the popularity of a website.
How Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings work?
Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings is based on another popular Cloudflare tool - the DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. When a user uses a 1.1.1.1 proxy to access a website, all their traffic will be recorded by Cloudflare and Cloudflare uses that data to evaluate which websites are visited the most.
According to Cloudflare's announcement, access through 1.1.1.1 will not store personal data, so you won't have to worry about privacy issues. Cloudflare uses many algorithms, including machine learning, to filter actual traffic and aggregate data based on that.
The differences between Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings and Alexa
Unlike Alexa, Cloudflare only gives specific rankings for the 100 most popular domains. For other domains, Cloudflare only ranks them in groups of 1000, 2000, 5000, … popular domains. In these groups, there will be no specific ranking, so we cannot tell if a domain in the 5000 most popular domains ranks exactly 2412 or 2310. All we know is it's in the top 5000 domains only.
Explaining this, Cloudflare says that because there are so mmuch noise in the data, algorithm-based analysis for less popular domains will be based on fewer features, so the data will be less accurate.
In addition to aggregating data by groups, we currently do not have a tool to look up which domain is in which group. Cloudflare currently only provides domain listings as CSV files for download. And we have to look up those lists ourselves.
Is Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings worth using?
For an average user, perhaps this tool is not very attractive, because it is quite inconvenient to have to look through CSV files. If Cloudflare provides a quick search, it will be easier for users to look up.
And if your website is in the top 100 most popular websites, you can look it up right on Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings very easily.
Either way, having a tool like Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings gives us another way to check a website's popularity. From there, it also provides more data and perspective to better optimize website and reach more users.
Try using Cloudflare Domain Rankings and let us know what you think in the comments.