What is going on with Alexa
I have been closely monitoring my Alexa Rank. In the last month, i have seen bloggernoob dot com go from 22k Alexa to 600k Alexa. Alexa is using a different stat measure from before. I have tried to find the answers to this, but no body seems to know what is going on at the moment. This could be a good thing, because it prevents people from juicing up their Alexa Rank, but at the same time, it’s very frustrating. Google PR is the industry standard for blog monetization. If you have a high PR rating on your blog, you can make money online. The higher your PR, the more money you can make online with you blog. Alexa is probably the second most popular ranking system. People still use it to measure your website popularity. Knowing how to game these rating systems can help you make money online.
Does anyone know what is going on with alexa? I always see my site fluctuate dramatically. It’s not very stable right now. Am i the only one, or do you guys see this on your site as well?
Popularity: 2% [?]
BloggerNoob is all about
September 11th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I can see your Alexa rank now is 107,941 (I use Search Status Plugin for FF). Mine has remain more or less steady on about 140,000.
I’ve just checked my 6 months Alexa traffic compared with yours and yes, yours has a lot of ups and downs, but not only recently, about 5 times in the last 6 months. I couldn’t say why though.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Maybe a bug with your alexa plugin.. I see 107k too.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:20 am
Weird.
If you look at your alexa traffic details, the trafic history details are interesting:
set the range tab to “max” and you will see that the reach and pageviews tabs are very similar (ie low pageviews = low reach).
I’ve found my own alexa page rank has been gradually improving (like yours during oct 2007 - Dec 2007).
Do the lows correspond to when you take a “break” from dropping and advertising on entrecard?
I’ve found that entrecard (and some social websites) have contributed to the rapid rise of computer-aid.com.au
I’m tempted to stop entrecard drops for a week, just as an experiment, to see if entrecard actually affects alexa.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:07 am
I’ve experienced similar things and I think Computer Aid may be on the right track. It appears as if Alexa is severely penalizing anyone who uses EntreCard.
I looked at the graph of your traffic,
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/bloggernoob.com
as well as the graph of my traffic:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/orient-lodge.com
In my case, the peaks are the times that I am not dropping cards on EntreCard. Those are also times that I am completely away from my computer, and only putting up minimal blog posts, so you would expect the exact opposite reaction.
For more information about this, I’ve written a couple blog posts:
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3036
and
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3076
exploring what has been going on. There is also a bit of discussion about this on the EntreCard forums. Turnip of Power has written some good material on this as well, as have others.
It seems as if either Alexa needs to fix its algorithms or people need to start learning that Alexa is extremely unreliable and advertisers should start looking at more reliable sites, like QuantCast.
September 12th, 2008 at 7:34 am
A lot of people are asking the same question. But there seems to be no answers anywhere.
Hopefully someone can answer it.
September 12th, 2008 at 8:59 am
What are these girls doing in every one of your posts?
. Its plain boring to see them smiling at you in EVERY posts.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
I thought this was because Alexa was changing its algorithm months ago? They take into account the bounce rate now if I’m not mistaken. The higher your bounce rate is, the worst your Alexa rank will become. This is one of the reason why people left Entrecard
September 12th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
I still have entrecard on my site but I have honestly not used it unless I happen to be visiting a site already & then just drop my card…i have probably ten thousand ecs or more just accumulating, lol. The bounce rate was not helping me at all, neither was stumble upon, which i’ve pretty much stopped using also.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Michael,
Having looked very closely at bounce rates, I don’t believe it has anything to do with bounce rates. During those peaks when I was not dropping on EntreCard, my bounce rate remained fairly constant, yet my Alexa ratings varied drastically.
If they do have some extremely weird algorithm about bounce rates, it is counter intuitive for advertising sites. As an advertiser, I would actually want to advertise on sites with a higher bounce rate, that is, people bouncing off of the site where I have an advertisement, to the site that I have advertised.
On a more serious note about bounce rates, I believe they are one of the most misunderstood metrics. I high bounce rate is bad if you are running an online store, but they are a sign of good design if you are running a blog.
I want my readers to look at my blog, read the most recent post, which is on the front page, and move on. I don’t want them to have to click around internally for a while, ultimately get frustrated, and not come back to my site.