May 3, 2011 – The two major services that analyze traffic to websites disagree over whether the past three months were good or bad for ten sites related to Marina City. They do agree that the forum for skyscraper enthusiasts operated by a Marina City resident is still a site the others should fear.

Traffic was up two percent between February and May at Jan Klerk’s skyscrapercity.com. According to Alexa, it is the 1,565th most popular site on the Internet.

The biggest improvement in traffic, says Alexa, was at the website for MAS Context, a quarterly journal on urban issues edited by Iker Gil, another Marina City resident. Traffic to mascontext.com was up 19 percent in the past three months.

Alexa says traffic was down at all but two Marina City websites. Another service, Compete, claims traffic is up at seven sites that it follows and down at three.

According to Alexa, the top five Marina City websites are skyscrapercity.com, chicagocarless.com, bin36.com, arcchicago.blogspot.com, and 10pinchicago.com. Compete says the top five are skyscrapercity.com, loopnorth.com, 10pinchicago.com, bin36.com, and crimsonchicago.com.

These variations are among the reasons web administrators are skeptical of such rankings. The methodology for ranking traffic differs substantially between the two services.

Alexa traffic rankings of Marina City related websites…

Alexa could not rank traffic to the Chicago pages of nationwide websites for Central Parking, Dick’s Last Resort, Thompson Hotels (Hotel Sax), House of Blues, Smith & Wollensky, and Transwestern. There was not enough traffic to rank bertrandgoldberg.org, marinawatchdog.blogspot.com, and vpfalk.net.

Overall, the top three sites, according to Alexa, are now Google, Facebook, and YouTube.