Stats: Alexa Lost the War. Compete is Too Slow.
Anyone who’s blogging with a goal in mind is most probably keeping an eye on the blog’s stats. The competition is strong in this area. We have Google Analytics, Statcounter , Google Trends, Technorati, Alexa, Compete and many more services.
Starting with the premise that – let’s say – the Alexa rank should not count for much in your blogging activity would be a contradictory affirmation. Why? Because:
- You should not blog with your stats in mind, or you’ll lose the focus on your community;
- As much as we hate to admit it, advertisers care about these stats.
So, we have to find that perfect way to deliver appealing content to our community, while still trying to improve our stats and attract new advertisers.
If you take a look around at how different advertising services or blog tops calculate the rates and ratings, we’ll see that each and every one takes these stats in consideration. But, what happens when the stats fail to reflect reality?
Alexa Lost the War
There’s no secret that with the latest “improvement” of their ranking system, Alexa took a decisive step towards their decline. Bloggers have talked about this and proof has been provided.
Let’s take Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger Alexa stats for example. You’ll see a big drop in his blog’s stats. Is that reflected that obviously in his activity? In his popularity? In his subscribers’ count that’s constantly growing? Same is available for John Chow.
From Blogsessive’s perspective, the story goes like this. About 3 months ago, the activity went into a bad period, due to some changes in my personal and professional life. Despite this, rankings continued to improve. In September, after my “come back”, activity has been continuously growing, making September the best month so far in all Blogsessive’s history. By the looks of it, October will be even better. Still, Alexa rankings drop.
I’d love it if someone could explain me how the best week ever fails to get a better rank than a 3 months average, taking in consideration 4 days of ranking below 40.000 and other 3 days with close traffic levels. Yet, how bad the rankings for those other 3 days have to be to come up with a 124.000 ranking? I’ve never been a huge fan of maths in school, but however you put it, this does not add up!
Also, I’ve been trying for 6 months to update that website screenshot. Is it such a complex task people?
Dear fellows at Alexa, it’s time to reconsider your system. It’s time to change, or simply disappear. Anyway, at this time, you’ve lost the stats war!
Compete is Too Slow
Since its launch, Compete has proven to be a good competitor for Alexa. A lot more information and definitely much more trustworthy. Premium accounts get even more relevant information, from traffic to keywords statistics, and most times, these confirm the reality.
So what’s the problem with Compete? The problem is that we’re living pretty darn dynamic times. Things change daily. New competitors launch daily. Information travel at light speed. So, why do I have to wait nearly one third of October and still see August stats? Where’s September’s stats and ranking?
Compete, if you want to survive this war, you need to provide that valuable information a lot faster! Otherwise, Alexa will be happy to have a companion at the end of the list.
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I hear a lot of complaining about Alexa.
That much I wish people stopped complaining and started ignoring it already.
By the way numbers are funny already but details are even more so. For example Alexa thinks that almost 50% of my traffic comes from South Africa. When it’s actually little over 1%. Talk about precision…
One thing you should remember is problogger and john chow dot com does not have many searchable articles.i mean those are not articles which people search for on the web.they are more dependent on the social folks like bloggers.But nothing can beat the search traffic.
There are so many blogs out, there who command a lot more traffic(much higher), but not so well known among the social community…
But yes i do agree that alexa has lots of weakness…however it does not mean that problogger and john chow get the max. traffic but still ranked poorly by alexa.
infact what these folks get, may not be comparable with the top traffic drivers from search engines…
Rarst: We “complain” because of that contradictory part I mentioned in the article. It affects our image in front of possible advertisers. Because a more trustworthy algorithm was replaced by a poor one. Not because our ranking start with a 4 or 3 instead of 2 maybe. Not because of the actual value, but because it lacks realism.
Rajesh: Alexa does not give a damn about search traffic or social media traffic. Tested both, and both affected the Alexa ranking just the same.
Further more, are you telling me that ProBlogger does not get search traffic? With the huge amount of content available, and most of all, with his great SERP on “blogging”.
I don’t know how he did, but Google shows him 3rd for the “blogging” keyword. Do you really believe that this position, which is amazing for such a general and competitive keyword, surpassed only by Wikipedia and Blogger.com, does not provide a good deal of search engine traffic?
Alexa does the math pretty wrong if you ask me.
@Alex
Yeah, I know about advertisers aspect. I meant that everyone both bloggers and advertises should just drop it.
i think that websites like alexa and so forth as just used for a basic impression of how your sites are doing …. you can’t hold any of these sites statistics as official or a real measure of your sites growth. keep in mind that your website is on the internet which can be viewed by anyone… but only people with alexa or technorati will be able to help you with alexa or technorati ranks..
I agree that problogger does drive search traffic for keywords relating to blogging…but what i meant is, there are so many other bloggers who command much more traffic than problogger for keywords that are more searched than those related to “blogging”.
i am speaking in comparative terms.Also i don’t know how you believe john chow still gets more traffic. He is not only blacklisted by google but he has converted his blog into more of a food blog these days…(I don’t know wheter he has changed his blogging niche or style again as it is a long time since i had been there)…
and i am also not sure whether google shows mercy on him for his food blogging skills…either you see food related posts or some sponsored posts.nothing much on the rest…but yes he still sticks to making money online (for Jhon chow)
Rajesh: Under no circumstances I’m trying to analyze John Chow’s posts’ quality. We’re only talking about traffic levels, and no matter how hard we try to negate it, his very active community proves us wrong.
Alex, personally, stats keep me going. When I saw my blog rise from 0 to 40 subscribers in the first month, it made me want more and that, in turn, made me try to come up with articles of a higher quality. It’s a win-win situation for me and my readers.
I wouldn’t be so harsh on John Chow tbh. Indeed, he sure posts a lot of crap lately, but he also has some black pearl articles that honestly helped me (and probably others) a lot. I guess going completely offtopic without losing your fanbase is one of the benefits of being a renowned blogger.
Tudi: You’re right. Stats can have that effect of feeling that your efforts are rewarded and pushing you to do even better. I’ve experience that feeling myself, and probably, that’s why it sometimes become frustrating knowing that the reality is distorted.