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Archive of ‘web analytics’ category

Are Alexa Rankings Becoming Irrelevant?

If you weren’t already aware, Alexa just instituted an update to their rankings – with pretty dramatic changes for many websites out there.

A case in point: My blog’s 3 month ranking had been 70,655  (still captured at Mark Wielgus’ Top 100 blog rankings)  – it’s now 157,638.

How an update can revise your website position by 80,000 positions is beyond me.

But that’s not the end of the goodness in store.

Mark’s 45n5 website has gone from 27,961 to  89,002 (a difference of 61,000 places)

The blogosphere’s most recognized ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s rating has been revised from 3,797  to 12,917 .

Which makes you wonder (more…)

Knock, Knock, Who’s There? – How To Easily Audit Your Website/Blog Traffic

If you use SEO (search engine optimization), you’d know that off-site optimization ranks higher in importance than on-site optimization. Being able to measure the number and quality of inbound links will give you an idea of the type of traffic your efforts generate.

Going from the social marketing angle, rather than looking at it from the search engine’s point of view, I’d look for links from high trustrank sites – these would typically be authoritative blogs and websites in your niche, and the traffic will send over will be higher quality too.

One indispensable tool I have installed in my Firefox browser is the SEO Quake extension. (extension = Firefox plugin).

seo quake

SEO Quake is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

When I’m at a search engine result page, SEO Quake will gather various analytics data and domain data.

For example, when combining Google Blog Search with SEO Quake:

blog search google

It’s a little small, but below each search result is (more…)

Alexa Analytics Representative of True Web Traffic?

Web analytics are a necesary part of your Internet Marketing operations because it gives you an idea of where your visitors came from and their behavior on your web page. The Alexa toolbar is one of the tools which I have covered previously, but recently it does not be giving you an accurate picture of my website traffic.

Here’s a shot of my blog stats stats from awstats (awesome web stats), the analytics program which comes with my Bluehost web account.

whoisandrewwee.com awstats

On a month-on-month basis, the stats are increasing from Jan to hit a high in May.

Yet Alexa reports:

alexa whoisandrewwee.com

A high in January, then plunge in April and a further plunge in June.

I’ve checked a number of sites too and their ratings seem to have (more…)

Hold the Alexa, here comes URLFan

Yes, we know Alexa isn’t accurate, in fact it has a number of blindspots, but it’s a easily accessed public web metric. But for checking out the Web2.0-ness of your site, you might like to check out URLFan.com.

urlfan.com

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

urlfan top sites

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I (more…)

Alexa Undergoes Major Overhaul, Smoother Data Aggregation

Some caveats about Alexa. Data collected from Alexa comes from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.

If you’re in a tech-oriented space like online marketing or technology, you’d generally rank better than non-tech-oriented niches like scrapbooking or home repairs.

Alexa is not a comprehensive metric, but it’s useful to get a rough indication of your traffic and it’s origins.

That being said, Alexa has recently (within the last 24-48 hours) been tweaking the presentation of their traffic rankings so the information is presently in a holistic fashion.

There’s no “new” data being presented, but you can access it in a single screen now, where previously you had to flip between several screens.

Best of all, the service continues to be free.

What’re the major changes?

The “reach” has been changed to present the percentage of Internet users you’re reaching (eg. 5% of “all” Internet users), where previously it showed a reach of 100 users per million users.

alexa

In my opinion, it’s not a very useful metric.

“Traffic Rank” and “Page Views” don’t appear to have changed.

What’s interesting are 2 new metrics.

I don’t want you to get the idea that they’re “new”, but rather Alexa now aggregates the information from other screens and consolidates them on your “Traffic Ranking” page.

Here’s the first one:

alexa

Which is useful because (more…)

Alexa upgrade?

You might’ve found that Alexa was a little slow, or chugging along a couple of hours ago.

Everything seems to have stabilized somewhat, and it looks like they’ve some upgrades in place.

Here’s what you can do now.

Alexa 061105

(more…)