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top 100 genealogy websites 2016


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The table below shows the combined top ten most popular ancestral and cemetery record websites for 2013 (it is interesting to note how six of the ten websites are owned by Ancestry).

Top 10 Genealogy Record Websites for 2013
Rank Website Free Pay Address
1 Ancestry.com pay http://www.ancestry.com/
2 Find A Grave free http://www.findagrave.com/
3 FamilySearch free https://www.familysearch.org/
4 Ancestry.co.uk pay http://www.ancestry.co.uk/
5 Archives.com pay http://www.archives.com/
6 Genealogy.com pay http://genealogy.com/
7 Arkivverket Digitalarkivet free http://arkivverket.no/eng/content/view/full/629
8 FindMyPast UK pay http://www.findmypast.co.uk/
9 Ancestry.com.au pay http://www.ancestry.com.au/
10 Ancestry.ca pay http://www.ancestry.ca/

 

The table below shows the ten most popular family tree websites for 2013 (in this case, six of the ten websites are owned by MyHeritage).

Top 10 Family Tree Websites for 2013
Rank Website Free Pay Address
1 MyHeritage.com pay http://www.myheritage.com/
2 Geni.com pay http://www.geni.com/
3 MyHeritage.no pay http://www.myheritage.no/
4 Genealogie.com pay http://www.genealogie.com/
5 WikiTree free http://www.wikitree.com/
6 MyHeritage.es pay http://www.myheritage.es/
7 Mundia pay http://www.mundia.com/
8 MyHeritage.de pay http://www.myheritage.de/
9 Tribal Pages pay http://tribalpages.com/
10 MyHeritage.fr pay http://www.myheritage.fr/

 

It is great that three genealogy societies made the Top 100 List this year. They are (#38) American Ancestors (the New England Historic Genealogical Society), (#57) Daughters of the American Revolution and new this year (#77) Ontario Genealogical Society.

The easiest way for a genealogy society to increase traffic to their website is to make available free genealogy records in a format that can be easily searched by Google.

It is also good to see that five genealogy blogs made the Top 100 List this year. They are (#22) Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter by Dick Eastman, (#80) Genea-Musings by Randy Seaver, (#89) Geneabloggers by Thomas MacEntee, (#94) Genealogy Blog by Leland & Patty Meitzler and (#95) Anglo-Celtic Connections by John D Reid.

There were also a couple of genealogy blogs that fell just outside of the Top 100 List. These include Dear Myrtle by Pat Richley-Erikson, Olive Tree Genealogy by Lorine McGinnis Schulze, British Genes by Chris Paton and Irish Genealogy News by Claire Santry. All excellent blogs.

Many people believe website popularity is based solely on the number of visitors to a website. In fact, number of visitors is only part of the equation. The number of pages a visitor reads and the amount of time spent on a website are also equally important in traffic rankings. Consider two websites A and B. Website A gets one visitor, who looks at one page for 10 seconds and then leaves. Website B also gets one visitor, but this visitor looks at several pages on the website and stays for 10 minutes before leaving. Clearly, visitor B is more valuable than visitor A. Alexa factors this in when ranking the popularity of a website. Thus, the Alexa ranking is much more refined than just the number of visitors to a website.

We were a bit surprised this year that more Australian genealogy websites did not make the Top 100 List (Trove does not qualify because it is part of the Australian National Library website). A few of the Australian genealogy websites that did rank highly were the Western Australia Genealogical Society, FindMyPast Australia, CoraWeb, and Gould Genealogy.

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