Think Tank Ranking Preview

In a short episode, Cord and Einar preview the new and improved Tallest Tree Think Tank Ranking. The new rankings will be automated, updated monthly, and incorporate more data than ever. This includes:

Budget data from ProPublicaTraffic, traffic value, domain rating, and backlink data from AhrefsPages indexed  from Serp APIWeb software from Wappalyzer

We're now able to pull historical traffic data from Ahrefs, which will give us insights into the last 36 months of performance for each of the 300+ groups in our study. We thank Ahrefs, who reviewed and approved our use of this data, for their support of this project.

We're also working with a new statistician, assistant professor of marketing at Clemson University, Lura Forcum. We're grateful for her insights on the data.

A few trends popped up in data review:

About 12% of groups are still dealing with www vs non-www canonical issuesMany sites have pop-ups that likely violate Google's Page Experience guidelinesWe found "spikey" traffic patterns for many groups, especially state-based think tanks, which may be explained by the location from which the traffic data was collectedWe saw a few sites that relaunched w/o redirects in place, which resulted in their referring domains crashing and large losses in trafficMany groups were affected by recent Google updatesMany groups saw growth in referring domains w/o growth in traffic