Web Ring / Topsite Rankings

Before Google was any good at finding a fan site, we had topsites.

A topsite was a CGI script running on somebody's shared host that kept a ranked list of member sites. You signed up, got a member ID, and stuck their button on your front page. The script counted, and the count decided who was on top. That was the whole thing.

Here's mine:

88 by 31 pixels, which was the standard size for these things. I hosted it on my own server like everybody did, and that turned out to matter way more than any of us knew at the time. The directories linked out through a redirect (topsites.cgi?action=out&id=259), so the real addresses died with their databases. But the button was pulled straight off each member's own machine, so the img tag on those old ranking pages still has everybody's actual domain sitting in it. That is the only reason I got 309 addresses back out of 609 listings.

FinalFantasyFanatic.com was in five of them. All five are dead now, but the Wayback Machine has their ranking pages, so I went and pulled them.

Here's the annoying part. Rank was never written on those pages as a number. It was just the order the rows came out in. So the only way to find out where we placed on any given day is to open the archived page and count down the list until you hit us. That's what all of this is. Eleven captures across five directories and eight months where FinalFantasyFanatic is standing somewhere in a list of Final Fantasy fan sites.

WHAT GOT COUNTED

These scripts ranked you on pageviews. Not on how much traffic they sent you, but on how many times one of your pages loaded their button. So the bigger your audience, the more free advertising the directory got, and the higher they put you in return. Everybody in the list was working for everybody else, and I don't think any of us thought about it that way at the time.

THE PLACEMENTS

  07/01/2002   FF Republic    rank 8 of 103 members
  08/04/2002   FF Republic    rank 11 of 117 members
  08/11/2002   FF Mages       rank 32 of 218 members       rated 5/5
  08/19/2002   Anime-Pinas    rank 16
  08/20/2002   RPG Genesis    rank 12
  09/06/2002   RPG Dreamer    rank 8 of 15 members         FEATURED MEMBER
  09/12/2002   Anime-Pinas    rank 25
  10/03/2002   RPG Dreamer    rank 11 of 47 members
  11/08/2002   RPG Genesis    rank 12
  12/04/2002   FF Republic    rank 17 of 162 members
  02/22/2003   FF Republic    rank 20 of 176 members

Top ten at FF Republic in July 2002 out of 103 sites. Top twenty at RPG Genesis. 32nd out of 218 at FF Mages, which was the big one, and somebody over there rated us 5 out of 5.

FF Republic is the only one with enough captures to see any kind of trend, and at first glance it looks bad. 8, then 11, then 17, then 20. Sliding down the list all year. Then look at the column next to it. 103 members in July, 176 by February. The list was growing underneath me. 8th of 103 and 20th of 176 are about the same spot percentage wise, so I was basically holding on while the field got 70% bigger.

THE DAY WE WERE THE FEATURED SITE

September 6, 2002. RPG Dreamer stuck Final Fantasy Fanatic in the Featured Member box at the top of the ranking page, above everybody else, with the button and the description:

    Featured Member
    Final Fantasy Fanatic - Another Run of the mill Final Fantasy Site
    but covers some fan made games as well

I don't remember writing that, but it does sound like something I would say. I was never really good with grandiose descriptions on my own, which is funny because the AI output in archive.org descriptions makes some great claims ("LEGENDARY SOFTWARE", "WAS LOST BUT NOW FOUND", etc.)

WHAT THE COUNTERS ACTUALLY SAW

One of the five, Anime-Pinas, kept a per site stats page, and the September 12, 2002 capture of ours is the best single document in this whole dig. It ran Aardvark Topsites 3.02 and here's what it said:

    Rank                  25
    Unique pageviews      51 today, 50 average
    Total pageviews       221 today, 222 average
    Unique hits IN        2 today, 1 average
    Unique hits OUT       1 today, 0 average

Look at those bottom two lines. "Hits in" is how many people the directory actually sent me. "Hits out" is how many I sent them. One or two people a day each direction. That's it. That is the entire traffic value of the whole arrangement.

And meanwhile I'm showing their button 222 times a day and getting ranked 25th for it. The whole thing ran on impressions. The actual clicking barely happened at all, and none of us knew because none of us could see this page for our own sites unless we went looking.

RPG Dreamer says the same thing in a different template. The day we were the featured site over there, our row showed 12 unique pageviews and 15 total. So being featured on a directory with 15 members did about what you'd expect, which is nothing.

NOW COMPARE IT TO MKSTATS

Here's where it gets interesting, because I have my own MKStats numbers for these exact months and I can hold them up next to each other.

Anime-Pinas counted 222 total pageviews a day in September 2002. MKStats, reading the actual server logs for September 2002, counted 968 pages a day.

Both numbers are right. The gap is the forum.

The topsite button was on the static pages. Front page, game sections, media pages. It was never on the Ikonboard pages, and the forum was far and away the busiest thing on the site:

    /cgi-local/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi      52,528 hits
    /index.html                              7,361 hits
    /cgi-bin/newcount                        6,618 hits

The forum beat the front page better than 7 to 1 in the last 90 days of logs, and every bit of that was invisible to all five directories. So these rankings are measuring the quiet half of my site and nothing else.

Which honestly applies to every 2002 fan site ranking anybody ever digs up. If you had a busy forum and a button only on the front page, you looked smaller than you were. If you were nothing but a front page, you looked bigger.

WHO ELSE WAS IN THERE

To get these placements I had to parse 280 archived ranking pages, and those pages turned out to be a census of the entire Y2K Final Fantasy web. 609 sites. 352 of them with a description the owner wrote by hand, in English, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. Piles of promises about MP3s and FMV galleries and walkthroughs coming soon that mostly never came.

FF Mages by itself had 218 members the day we placed 32nd. 218 Final Fantasy fan sites in August 2002, every one of them run by somebody who thought it was worth doing.

Almost all of them are gone. Two I was listed with are not. Caves of Narshe was in that same FF Mages ranking, and it is still up right now at cavesofnarshe.com. RPGamer was next to us at RPG Dreamer, and it's still being served too.

THE FULL LIST

All 609 sites with every address I could recover, every description their owner wrote, and a Wayback link for each one.

That file also lists all 280 archived ranking pages this came out of, so every number above can be checked against the capture it came from. Go look up a site you remember.