April 21, 2008
Alexa rankings: are they worth jack S$%^?
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Meg Tsiamis over at the rather splendid ‘Dipping into the Blogpond’ has put the cat amongst the pigeons.
Or rather, my cat amongst my own pigeons.
It appears that Alexa, one of the earliest site monitoring and comparison engines, has put fresh batteries in its trusty pocket calculator and as a result some Aussie sites have improved their rankings, whilst others have gone backwards.
As the 20-ish comments point out, Alexa is so bizarre and illogical a monitoring tool that using it is just about a complete waste of time.
Meg herself acknowledges the irregularity of Alexa and that some of us prefer to assess our ’success’ or otherwise by visitor, subscriber and comment numbers, rather than Alexa’s bizarrely tortuous calculations. This has long been my ‘beef’ about her stats — I argue that how can a site with large subscriber numbers be considered ‘less’ than a site with relatively poor subscriber and comment numbers? Meg herself suggests that until we are open and transparent about our site traffic, our ‘true’ popularity or otherwise cannot be accurately assessed.
So, in the spirit of openness and trust, here’s my blog’s stats and my Web1.0 article website’s stats:
| Blog BetterCommunicationResults.com |
Web1.0 site BetterCommunicationResults.com.au |
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Essential stats:
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Essential stats [due to change of hosting, this site only started being tracked in late-Jan 2008]:
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Click on the images to see a larger, clearer version…
Make of them what you will… but I wish more bloggers/pod/vidcasters would put their Feedburner subscriber numbers up; that at least would help the ‘bean counters’ in their number crunching.
Stumble it!
Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, housekeeping, marketing, podcasting, tools, videoblog
3 Responses to “Alexa rankings: are they worth jack S$%^?”
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May 1st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
[...] up on my earlier post/rant about rankings over on Meg’s counter, here’s the stats for this month and the last few, [...]
May 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 am
[...] Meg’s own admission her ranking system is flawed, and so I again called into question whether her list, by way of [...]
May 7th, 2008 at 9:39 am
[...] to Alexa on April 18, Better Communications Results’ Lee Hoskins responded with an entry that takes issue with Alexa and therefore Blogpond’s chart, titled “Alexa rankings: are they worth jack [...]