On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 05:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anyhow, my research at the time suggested that for every *doubling* of traffic, you generally *halve* your rank. That's a rough rule of thumb, but it held remarkably well.
That is, a site ranked 500 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1000. And a site ranked 845 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1690. If we are 2,140 and they are 845, then they have more than twice the traffic that we have.
Actually, I read somewhere that this seems to be a general law for all kinds of rankings. That is, if you rank cities in the United States (or the world) by population, a city with twice the rank will have about half the population. If you rank English words by frequency of usage, then a word with twice the rank will be used about half as often. (And of course there's nothing special about "doubling"; something with a rank ten times as high will have one-tenth the popularity.)
Carl Witty