Performance Evaluation of Internet Domain Ranking Methodologies

Internet domain ranking is one of the important tools for demonstrating a domain popularity level. To evaluate and rank Internet/web domains according to their referrals, popularity, and traffic, domain rankings are extracted in various methods. This study investigates and analyzes these methods and their relevant platforms. For this purpose, the main ranking methods and their inherent characteristics, including similarity, stability, responsiveness, and the degree of benignity (e.g., the low possibility of changing the lists), are examined, and their potential effects on the conclusions are determined. Furthermore, this study specifies the domains ranking indicators used by the main ranking methods. Finally, as the main conclusion of this study, using the Cloudflare radar and combined Tranco ranking are recommended to rank the Internet domains. Moreover, in domains ranking, for each domain of the extracted list, it is necessary to check their IP and Name Server (NS) and delete those that do not have an IP address or their NS are expired.  We have used the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology to obtain an overall ranking score between different competing ranking scenarios/criteria. Based on the results of this paper, we can conclude that the Cloudflare radar and Tranco with overall ranking efficiency score of 81.8% and 79.9% are the most efficient ranking methodologies based on mixture of different ranking metrics, respectively.