Most popular astrologers, most popular horoscope pages: what rankings really measure

Anyone searching for the best-known astrologers or the best horoscope pages reliably ends up with a list. Ten names, fifteen addresses, an order, done. Listings like these read well because they bring order to a field that is hard to survey. The only question is where that order comes from – and hardly any of these pages gives an answer.

There is no official ranking

There is no authority that reviews astrological work and puts it into an order. In this field only one thing can be measured reliably anyway: reach. Clicks, page views, mentions, search positions – a ranking can be built out of those, and that is exactly what happens. It then tells you who reaches a lot of readers, and nothing else.

That is no small matter. Being well known comes from appearances in magazines and on television, from good placings in search engines, from a name that sticks and from a domain that has been there for twenty years. All of that can coincide with careful work. It does not have to.

How such lists come about

Most rankings on the web are built in one of three ways, and often in a mixture of them:

• By visibility. The editors look up who ranks high for certain search terms and adopt that order. What this measures above all is search engine optimisation.
• By personal taste. Someone puts together what they know and value themselves. The selection may be a shrewd one, but it is an opinion and not a survey.
• By payment. Places are paid for, or the links are affiliate links on which every purchase made that way brings in money. The order then follows the commission.

None of these ways of building a list is objectionable from the outset. It only becomes a problem when the result is presented as a neutral measurement while the method is kept quiet.

What a list ought to state

A few questions are usually enough. Does it say which criteria the sorting followed? Is there a date, and when was it last checked? Is advertising marked as advertising? Is a reason given for why one particular entry made it onto the list, or is there nothing there but a name and two adjectives? And is it stated anywhere who put the list together?

If all these details are missing, what you have in front of you is not a ranking but a collection of links with numbers in front of them. There is nothing wrong with that – you should simply not take it for more.

Judging horoscope pages yourself

Instead of trusting an order drawn up by someone else, you can check for yourself in a few minutes what you are dealing with. These points help most:

• What is asked for? A page that asks only for the star sign can talk only about the sun sign. Anyone who requires date of birth, time of birth and place of birth calculates a full chart with houses and an ascendant.
• Is the method named? Reputable providers state what was calculated and what the reading rests on. If that is missing, it remains unclear whether anything was calculated at all.
• Does the text fit you alone? Do the cross-check and read the same passage under a sign that is not yours. If it fits just as well there, it is pitched in general terms and not calculated.
• What happens to your data? Date of birth, time of birth and place of birth are personal details. A privacy policy that says in plain words what is stored belongs with them.
• Where does the freely readable part end? A text that breaks off right before the interesting place, and a counter running backwards beside it, belong to sales technique and not to interpretation.

Being well known says little about fit

Even an honestly compiled ranking does not answer your real question. That question is not who has the most readers, but who writes and works in a way that does something for you. There is a simple test for it: read two or three freely available texts from the same source. Do you understand what is being talked about? Are terms explained, or merely scattered in? Does anything stay with you after the reading that you can work with?

If you want to start at an unhurried pace, freely available texts are a good way in – the free horoscopes, for instance, or the free weekly horoscope. Anyone who would rather understand the groundwork first will find it under astrology and with the planets. Both take you further than any list of the ten best, where in the end you believe only the first name because it stands at the top.