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Posts Tagged ‘web analytics’

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…)

SEO For the NEW Google / Yahoo! / MSN

Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins has kindly put up the presentations from the recent (and inaugural) Affiliate Summit London.

wil reynolds

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds

One of the presenters, Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds didn’t fail to shine as always with his “SEO For the New Google / Yahoo! / MSN” presentation (somewhat wordy, but chock full of content as usual).

No word yet on whether Shawn will have the videos up, but you can download (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…)

Is your Alexa ranking worth anything?

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.

Alexa graph WhoIsAndrewWee.com

Alexa traffic rankings WhoIsAndrewWee.com

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.”

(more…)