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 70,655Â (still captured at Mark Wielgus’ Top 100 blog rankings)Â – 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 3,797Â to 12,917 .
Which makes you wonder (more…)
In this episode of the Friday Podcast, we look at shaping your content to draw relevant traffic and monetize the traffic.
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For the notes, click “more”:
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Segregating your traffic by geographical location is a useful thing and is known in the search engine marketing circles as “geotracking”, but you could go one step further and target specific traffic based on geographical location using the cryptic practise known as “geotargeting”. But what happens when it’s used to block access to users based on their geography?
Witness:
So now I’m not able to use my favorite music service at Pandora.com.
Pandora works in the following fashion: You select your favourite artist and the service makes (more…)
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.
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:
Which is useful because (more…)
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.
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The Alexa ranking’s always a controversial topic.
Zach, head brain at DomainSocial, frequently tells me it’s easily manipulated.
So’ve a number of other experienced Internet guys.
It was useful for Jason to mention it on his Off the Top of My Head blog.
And more usefully, see if he could abuse it.
In case you weren’t aware book e-tailer Amazon acquired Alexa in 1999.
A number of people promote/publicize their Alexa rankings (myself included).
In fact, here’s my latest stats.
So what does this mean?
After a period of testing detailed in Jason’s post: Manipulating Alexa Isn’t What It Used to Be
Jason comes to the conclusion “the testing I did convinced me that Alexa is not as easily manipulated as it used to be. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be able to be manipulated at all.”
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