Documentation Hub

How LA Rank Works

Understand our real-time telemetry engine, the algorithmic ranking system, and how to claim your spot on the global discovery leaderboard.

1. How Ranking Works

Sites are ranked mainly by the verified unique visitors their website receives. Visitors are measured by our visitor tracking pixel — one small snippet you paste into your site — so the number is observed, not claimed. Traffic is by far the biggest factor.

Community signals also help: signed-up upvotes, verified reviews from users who actually visited the site, and engagement quality. These will not beat traffic on their own, but they separate great sites from good ones.

We do not use subjective reviews. Every review on LA Rank is verified — only users who have clicked through to a site can leave one.

  • Unique Visitors: the verified traffic your website receives, counted by our pixel. One visitor means one IP address inside a 12-hour window, so refreshes and repeat page loads cannot inflate your rank.
  • Upvotes: Only members with a confirmed email address can upvote, and each member gets one upvote per platform. Anonymous votes score nothing.
  • Reviews: A member can only review a platform they visited in the last 30 days — that is a Verified Visit review. One review per member, and it counts only once a moderator publishes it.
  • Engagement: How long visitors actually stay after a verified visit. Measurement is not live yet, so every platform currently receives the same neutral baseline.

One thing that is not part of your rank: the clicks we send you. "Visitors we sent this site" is published on your profile as a statistic, but a platform climbs by earning real visitors, not by collecting outbound clicks.

2. Visitor Tracking & Badges

Ranking starts with one snippet. The visitor tracking pixel is an invisible 1x1 image you paste into your website: every time a page carrying it is opened we record a visitor, and it is that number — the traffic reaching your own site — that your rank is built from.

To be exact about what it counts: the pixel measures the visitors to your site, not the clicks LA Rank sends you. Repeat views from the same address inside a 12-hour window count once, so reloading your own page can never move your rank.

Both snippets below carry the same unique verification token — either one identifies your website to us, and neither is required to keep a listing live.

Option A: Visitor Pixel

An invisible 1x1 image that counts the unique visitors to your site. Paste it in your footer, or just before </body>.

<img src="https://liveadvertise.com/ping/TB-YOUR-TOKEN" width="1" height="1" style="display:none;" />

Option B: Live Rank Badge

A 200 x 48 badge showing your current position, repainted on our side every few hours. Display only — it adds no score.

<a href="https://liveadvertise.com/listing/YOUR-PAGE"><img src="https://liveadvertise.com/badge/TB-YOUR-TOKEN.svg" width="200" height="48" alt="LA Rank badge" style="border:0" /></a>

Anti-Cheat Active: one visitor means one IP address inside a 12-hour window. Rapidly refreshing your own page cannot inflate your rank, and the badge is decorative — installing it neither helps nor hurts your score.

3. Submitting a New Platform

To add your site to LA Rank:

  1. Register a free account and open your dashboard.
  2. Choose Add New Platform and enter your root URL (for example https://yourbrand.com). Only the homepage of a root domain is accepted — subdomains and deep links are rejected.
  3. Write a title of up to 60 characters, a pitch of up to 250, and pick the category the site belongs in.
  4. Upload a wide banner image — a 1200 x 600 shape is a good example, up to 2 MB.
  5. Paste the tracking snippet into your site so your visitors are counted from day one. A person reviews the listing, and once it is approved it appears on the board and starts competing on the traffic it receives.

4. Claiming a Listing

Well-known platforms can be catalogued before their owner joins us, using information that is already public (the site itself, and the Tranco index of popular domains). Those pages carry an Unclaimed badge and are ranked from that estimate — they have no measured traffic behind them yet.

If your site is already listed and you want control of it, open the listing and choose ⚡ Claim Platform. We show you your ownership token and ask you to publish a small text file at the root of your domain, named exactly topbest-verify.txt, containing that token. Our server fetches the file — a meta tag will not do — and the moment it matches, the listing moves into your Dashboard with its history intact.

From there you install the tracking pixel and edit the pitch, banner and links, so the listing competes on measured traffic instead of an estimate. The file name is an older identifier kept exactly as it is so domains that already publish it keep working; the claim screen always shows the name and token to use.

Dofollow outbound links

Outbound links follow the listing, not a price list. While a listing is unclaimed, its "Visit" links carry rel="nofollow". Once the owner has been verified, every outbound link to that site becomes a followed link — on the listing page, the boards, the cards and the Featured rail at once. There is no upgrade to buy and no box for anyone to tick: claiming the listing is the switch.

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