Overview

Wave rankings are a new feature exclusive to Brandpa. Over the course of 30 days every single domain goes through a wave of ranking higher and lower on our main domain listings page. The aim is to get more exposure to more domain names, especially older domains.

Why?

Many people have said that websites that sell domain names tend to bury older domains, making them less likely to sell over time. The age of a listing is commonly used to sort domains. Until September 2020, Brandpa used to list our most recent domains first. Some other websites prefer to list their older domains first. In both cases, this can lead to “feast or famine”, where some lucky domains get lots of attention, and others fail to get the exposure they deserve. Wave rankings are designed to spread out exposure over time.

How they work in detail

Brandpa adds a sine wave to the ranking of each domain name, which nudges that domain’s ranking higher and lower over time, like this:

One complete up/down cycle takes exactly 30 days. When a domain is listed it starts at zero (no effect), then it gradually goes up, and then down, and then back up, over the course of 30 days. The cycle then starts again.

The transition is gradual, and continuous – i.e. it is happening minute-by-minute, but very slowly. In the course of a day, you shouldn’t expect rankings to change much. Say a domain ranks (say) 3rd on our listing page today, it might change to 2nd or 5th tomorrow, but it won’t suddenly change to (say) 165th. However, over the course of a week or two, the change can add up to quite a bit.

The result is that older domains will be more likely to be shown on our main listings page, and that newer domains will be shown slightly less often overall.

Brandpa still strongly prefers to show good quality domains first, so wave rankings don’t mean that every single domain will end up on the top of our listing page. But the age of a listing will no longer cause a domain to fade away forever.

What uses wave rankings?

Wave rankings only affect our main domain listings page. Our homepage, section pages (e.g. Cryptocurrency) and search results are unaffected. This may change in future.