3 ms·

I'm honestly amazed that out of the top million sites, which probably includes a ton of tiny tiny sites that are idle or abandoned, only ten percent are offline

I'm honestly amazed that out of the top million sites, which probably includes a ton of tiny tiny sites that are idle or abandoned, only ten percent are offline.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
How many are placeholder pages thrown up by registrars like Network Solutions?
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  If they're placeholder pages, they're not dead. Those 10% are not responding at all; the requests aren't reaching any HTTP server.
  - winddude 4y ago
    at least from his computer/script. A number could have been blocked simply detecting him as a bot.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    Not all placeholder pages will forever stay placeholder pages though. Some may get sold, become a site, then stop being a site again. Some may not get sold, come up for renewal and be deemed unlikely to be worth trying to sell anymore (renewal is cheap for a registrar but the registry will still charge a small fee). Of course the vast majority with enough interest to make this list will either be sold and be an active page or still be an active placeholder but I wouldn't rule out there being a good count of pages towards the lower end of the top million being placeholders that were eventually deemed not worth trying for anymore.
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      Exactly. Afaik, there's even a whole auction based side industry trading expired domains. When you see a placeholder page, the original site is for all intents and purposes, dead. The domain just happens to be interesting enough that someone wants to stick an ad on it rather than let it resolve to nothing.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        Yabbut a placeholder page returns status 200. We're discussing URLs that don't return any status at all; they are unresponsive. They have no placeholder; they aren't a "place". A site that is occupied by a placeholder page is a 200, as far as that "top million" database is concerned. It might as well be a working shopfront or blog.
ehsankia 4y ago
How is "top" defined here? If they were dead, wouldn't they fairly quickly stop being "top"? EDIT: the article uses a list sorted by inlinks, and I guess other websites don't necessarily update broken links, but that may be less true in the modern age where we have tools and automated services to automatically warn us about dead links on our websites.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I can expect large SEO spam clusters of "sites" with many links inside a cluster to make them look legit. For some time such bits of SEO spam were on top of certain google searches and enjoyed significant traffic, putting them firmly into "top 1M". Once a particular SEO trick is understood and "deoptimized" by Google, these "sites" no longer make money, and get abandoned.
Swizec 4y ago
Blows my mind that my blog is 210863rd on that list. That makes the web feel somehow smaller than I thought it was.
- wincent 4y ago
  Eyeing you jealously from my position at 237,014 on the list... We're almost neighbors, I guess.
mike_hock 4y ago
Yeah, I'd expect a list of 1,000,000 "top" "sites" to contain much more than what can be called a "site," especially in 2022 when the internet has been all but destroyed and all that's left is a corporate oligopoly.

I'm honestly amazed that out of the top million sites, which probably includes a ton of tiny tiny sites that are idle or abandoned, only ten percent are offline.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

How many are placeholder pages thrown up by registrars like Network Solutions?

denton-scratch 4y ago
If they're placeholder pages, they're not dead. Those 10% are not responding at all; the requests aren't reaching any HTTP server.
- winddude 4y ago
  at least from his computer/script. A number could have been blocked simply detecting him as a bot.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Not all placeholder pages will forever stay placeholder pages though. Some may get sold, become a site, then stop being a site again. Some may not get sold, come up for renewal and be deemed unlikely to be worth trying to sell anymore (renewal is cheap for a registrar but the registry will still charge a small fee). Of course the vast majority with enough interest to make this list will either be sold and be an active page or still be an active placeholder but I wouldn't rule out there being a good count of pages towards the lower end of the top million being placeholders that were eventually deemed not worth trying for anymore.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Exactly. Afaik, there's even a whole auction based side industry trading expired domains. When you see a placeholder page, the original site is for all intents and purposes, dead. The domain just happens to be interesting enough that someone wants to stick an ad on it rather than let it resolve to nothing.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      Yabbut a placeholder page returns status 200. We're discussing URLs that don't return any status at all; they are unresponsive. They have no placeholder; they aren't a "place". A site that is occupied by a placeholder page is a 200, as far as that "top million" database is concerned. It might as well be a working shopfront or blog.

ehsankia 4y ago

How is "top" defined here? If they were dead, wouldn't they fairly quickly stop being "top"? EDIT: the article uses a list sorted by inlinks, and I guess other websites don't necessarily update broken links, but that may be less true in the modern age where we have tools and automated services to automatically warn us about dead links on our websites.

nine_k 4y ago
I can expect large SEO spam clusters of "sites" with many links inside a cluster to make them look legit. For some time such bits of SEO spam were on top of certain google searches and enjoyed significant traffic, putting them firmly into "top 1M". Once a particular SEO trick is understood and "deoptimized" by Google, these "sites" no longer make money, and get abandoned.

Swizec 4y ago

Blows my mind that my blog is 210863rd on that list. That makes the web feel somehow smaller than I thought it was.

wincent 4y ago
Eyeing you jealously from my position at 237,014 on the list... We're almost neighbors, I guess.

mike_hock 4y ago

Yeah, I'd expect a list of 1,000,000 "top" "sites" to contain much more than what can be called a "site," especially in 2022 when the internet has been all but destroyed and all that's left is a corporate oligopoly.