There’s a more recent is listing here

Top 30 Sydney Food Blogs

By Thang Ngo

As of today, there are over 802 registered Sydney food blogs on Urbanspoon. While they compile a “Leaderboard”, as John from he needs food blog explains, the Urbanspoon Leaderboard “ranking actually has nothing to do with a bloggers popularity… The more people click on the Urbanspoon restaurant page that you have your review on, the higher you go up the list. Nothing to do with with your blog or its popularity”.

He quotes from Kate, an Urbanspoon spokesperson: “Our blog leaderboard calculation is actually simpler than you’ve been guessing: It’s a sum of page views in the past 30 days for every restaurant you’ve reviewed. It was intended to be fun, so we didn’t put the time into constructing a more complicated algorithm.”

Of course, the only accurate way to measure a blog’s popularity is by collecting actual traffic data, however, at the moment this is not publicly available.

So noodlies has compiled a list of the Top 30 Sydney food blogs (as at 7 July 2013) using data from Urbanspoon, Google and Alexa.

Congratulations to Lorraine Elliott, her popular blog, Not Quite Nigella is the #1 ranked Sydney food blog.

#BlogAlexaAddress
1Not Quite Nigella105,247http://www.notquitenigella.com/
2Cook Republic211326http://www.cookrepublic.com/
3Gourmantic396,634http://www.gourmantic.com/ 
4Rasberri Cupcakes427,224http://www.raspberricupcakes.com/ 
5Grab Your Fork510,177http://grabyourfork.blogspot.com.au/ 
6noodlies714,567https://noodlies.com/
7Chocolatesuze733,062http://www.chocolatesuze.com/
8A table for two770,883http://atablefortwo.com.au/
9Citrus and Candy842,046http://www.citrusandcandy.com/
10JENIUS997,597http://www.jenius.com.au/ 
11he needs food1,026,196http://heneedsfood.com/ 
12Simon food favourites1,107,732http://simonfoodfavourites.blogspot.com.au/ 
13Eat Show and Tell1,110,015http://www.eatshowandtell.com/
14the food blog1,123,592http://thefoodblog.com.au/
15Inside cuisine1,313,347http://insidecuisine.com/ 
16Belly Rumbles1,487,959http://bellyrumbles.com/
17Addicted & consuming1,488,136http://jeroxie.com/addiction/
18Street Food1,572,161http://www.streetfood.com.au/
19bitemeshowme1,592,330http://bitemeshowme.wordpress.com/ 
20The Adventures of Miss Piggy1,644,036http://www.theadventuresofmisspiggy.com/ 
21Unberable Lightness of Being Hungry2,161,687http://www.theunbearablelightnessofbeinghungry.com/
22thecattylife2,206,748http://www.thecattylife.com/ 
23Vegetaraian2,209,809http://vegetaraian.com/
24when the world stops spinning2,246,725http://vxdollface.tumblr.com/ 
25Food, Booze and Shoes2,399,491http://foodboozeshoes.blogspot.com.au/ 
26One bite more2,539,039http://www.onebitemore.com/ 
27Urban Chic Guides2,554,219http://www.urbanchicguides.com/
28Confessions of a glutton2,622,667http://confessionsofaglutton.com/
29Coridor Kitchen2,649,198http://corridorkitchen.com/
30Sydney Cool2,708,359http://www.sydneycool.com.au/
31See u in Sydney2,737,380http://www.seeuinsydney.com/
32missklicious2,753,327http://missklicious.blogspot.com.au/
33Excuse Me Waiter2,764,538http://www.excusemewaiter.com/ 
34I’m Still Hungry3,193,902http://imstillhungry.net/ 

How does this ranking work?

It’s a four step process, conducted on Sunday, 7 July 2013:

  1. Select the top 50 Sydney food blogs according to Urbanspoon’s Sydney food blog leaderboard
  2. Google “Sydney food blog” and select blogs from the first five pages (50 results)
  3. De-duplicated Urbanspoon and Google lists to get a combined list of 68 food blogs
  4. Used Alexa to find the “World Rank” of each blog, the lower the rank the greater the estimated traffic numbers and higher ranking on the Top 30 Sydney food blog list

Note:

  • Does my bomb look big in this? is an established and popular food blog. However, its blog platform, livejournal, is not ranked by Alexa and so it’s not included in the above list.
  • Taking on board Simon’s comment, I’ve added his lower Alexa ranking
  • Taking on board Shez’s comment, I’ve added her blog onebitemore.com and rasberricupcakes.com – and extended the list beyond 30
  • Added Cook Republic, Addicted & Consuming, Inside Cuisine blogs to the list.

What is Alexa?

Alexa is a data company owned by Amazon. Alexa traffic estimates based on a panel of millions of internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions. From the panel each website in the world is given an Alexa Traffic Rank, it’s a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. According to Alexa: “The rank is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1”. Facebook currently holds the #1 Alexa Traffic Rank, followed by Google.

Of course, Alexa only estimates website traffic and while there are limitations, even detractors concede it “is the most widely known website-traffic tracking site on the Internet” and while traffic estimates may be in question, there is general agreement that as a raking tool, it has merit “Many people get confused as to the true purpose of Alexa, it is primarily a COMPARISON tool, it does an OK job of comparing how your websites are measuring up against your web competitors sites”.

Also, as it’s a relative ranking tool, if the ranking for one website is 500,000 it doesn’t mean that double the traffic numbers of a site ranked at 1,000,000.

And the future?

Based on your feedback, noodlies is keen to add more blogs to the list with the aim to produce the most comprehensive list of all Sydney food blogs. More details soon…

What do you think?

As bloggers, blog readers, marketers, PR and brands – do you find this Top 30 Sydney food blog list useful? What else can we do to improve on it?

Leave a comment to make a contribution…