Alexa ranking
Alexa ranking is a very strange thing.
I wrote about efforts to improve the ranking of this site a few weeks ago. So far I have been marginally successful in that the ranking has risen from 1,627,533 to 1,275,521. It’s not much, but it’s in the right direction.
What is surprising about the above figures is that traffic has not increased at all in the period between then and now. In fact, it shows a downward trend.
In contrast, traffic to the other site has remained remarkably constant over the same period, yet its ranking has dropped from 195,510 to 203,289.
I am aware that Alexa is not the best yardstick for the measurement of site traffic, as it depends on the viewer having the plugin installed, but I find the above figures somewhat bemusing.
The one unfortunate thing about Alexa though is that it tends to be used by advertising companies to determine a site’s popularity. As advertising is contained in both sites, Alexa ranking is fairly important to me.
The only thing I can think of is that this site tend to have more technical content, and therefore is more likely to be visited by people with the plugin.
Knowing that my site only has the “obligatory” AdSense text ads in the sidebar and also knowing that when it comes to monetizing my site I’m a complete failure, I pretty much stopped caring about Page Rank and Alexa quite awhile back. I especially stopped paying attention to Alexa when my site’s rank starting fluctuating all over the place with no change in visitor count, pages hit or time spent.
According to a Google Page Rank bookmarklet I keep tucked away in my bookmarks toolbar, my old personal blog still has a PR5 but the majority pages hit are old posts about Firefox and WordPress (written over a year old). very few hits on anything else.
So much for realistic picture of how things are site-wise.