Back in September, we started looking at official campaign website traffic ratings for Democratic, Republican, Green and Independent candidates for president. To measure traffic to the presidential candidates’ websites, we rely on rankings from Alexa, a website that collects information on site visits for websites across the internet by users of the Alexa toolbar, then uses a combination of visitors and page views to a website to calculate a page rank. The most visited site in the whole internet would have a rank of 1, and the least visited website — well, that would get a big fat blank. Bottom line: the lower the page rank, the more visits and visitors a web page has been getting lately.
The following are the Alexa page ranks of Democratic, Green, Independent and Republican presidential candidates measured on October 9 and measured again on October 20, 2007. The last column on the right shows the change between those two dates (remember, a higher ranking shows up as a lower number rank):
| 10/9/2007 | 10/20/2007 | Change | |
| Democrats | |||
| Joseph Biden: | 205,128 | 238,901 | (down 33,773 in rank) |
| Hillary Clinton: | 34,068 | 31,817 | (up 2,251 in rank) |
| Christopher Dodd: | 283,534 | 128,087 | (up 155,447 in rank) |
| John Edwards: | 66,675 | 90,787 | (down 24,112 in rank) |
| Mike Gravel: | 198,295 | 216,964 | (down 18,669 in rank) |
| Dennis Kucinich: | 115,620 | 61,000 | (up 54,620 in rank) |
| Barack Obama: | 22,126 | 22,877 | (down 751 in rank) |
| Bill Richardson: | 240,954 | 177,900 | (up 63,054 in rank) |
| Independents | |||
| Orion Karl Daley: | 6,417,166 | 6,298,163 | (up 119,003 in rank) |
| Kelcey Wilson: | 4,059,989 | 2,037,349 | (up 2,022,640 in rank) |
| Greens | |||
| Jared Ball: | 4,054,526 | 943,896 | (up 3,110,630 in rank) |
| Jerry Kann: | no visits by alexa users | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) |
| Kent Mesplay: | no visits by alexa users | no visits by alexa users | (no change in rank) |
| Joe Schriner: | 4,444,815 | no visits by alexa users | (drop in rank) |
| kat swift: | 9,081,161 | 9,112,647 | (down 31,486 in rank) |
| Republicans | |||
| Rudolph Giuliani: | 126,455 | 97,876 | (up 28,579 in rank) |
| Mike Huckabee: | 171,185 | 111,793 | (up 59,392 in rank) |
| Duncan Hunter: | 402,701 | 297,142 | (up 105,559 in rank) |
| Alan Keyes: | 653,900 | 435,494 | (up 218,406 in rank) |
| John McCain: | 152,012 | 143,658 | (up 8,354 in rank) |
| Ron Paul: | 19,019 | 8,605 | (up 10,414 in rank) |
| Mitt Romney: | 82,405 | 77,877 | (up 4,528 in rank) |
| Tom Tancredo: | 433,828 | 493,684 | (down 59,856 in rank) |
| Fred Thompson: | 101,435 | 100,829 | (up 606 in rank) |
For quick reference, I’ve labeled upward trends with green and downward trends with red. Sam Brownback is out of the race for the Republican nomination, so he’s out of our tracking stats as well. Christopher Dodd, on the other hand, is anywhere but out. Dodd trended up in website visits between October 9 and October 20. With Dodd’s breakout commitment to hold and filibuster warrantless wiretapping legislation, that trend may continue. Dennis Kucinich’s Alexa ranking is growing stronger, too, stronger than John Edwards’ for the period as attention to Edwards declines somewhat. Then there’s Ron Paul. You know, there’s a barrier effect to website rankings; once you’ve gotten up in the rankings it’s very hard to get higher because every other website in that group is highly competitive and, well, there just aren’t that many numbers in ranking left to go. But Ron Paul’s done it, halving his website rank during the month of October so far. I don’t agree with many of the man’s stands, but it’s undeniable that he is coming on strong as a candidate, at least on the Internet.
We’ll take a look at these again after another week or two and see whether and how trends change.
