Alexa will never be as accurate as “real” stats but at the same time, I believe they should provide the most accurate statistics as possible.
Let’s see what happens over the next couple days.
If your Alexa ranking has “shot up” or “tanked”, please feel free to leave a comment with you website and your inputs on the new system.
Check out the new features this new ranking system will bring:
In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!
We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.
You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.
Below are a few common questions we anticipate from the Alexa community, along with our answers.
My site’s ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?
Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.
The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.
Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.
We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.
Will you change the rankings again?
We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don’t foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.
I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?
We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it’s done we like it even better. We hope you will too.
We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.
Do you want to know what I think about this?
Definitely. We’ve been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we’ve done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.
Well, I was over at AdTech 2008 today, an exhibit which shows off America’s best advertising/publishing companies. Today, I found many new ways to monetize our blogs and social networks through various different affiliate and publishing programs.
I did get a chance to run into John Chow and also ask my own questions about how to make money online and the secrets behind his success.
I figured to take a video and share it with the world so maybe it will help you make more money too:
I was sitehoppin’ today and found this great post on a Firefox plugin called “Rank Checker” that can help you analyze your rankings on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. As an old-school, I personally do not rely on these methods, but it can be very helpful and information to know your rankings using this tool.
I like being able to check my rankings real quickly without worrying that some SEO company is aggregating my data and/or spying on me. This tool is open source and hosted your computer - designed with privacy in mind.
Looking at the rankings of a couple of your sites that you know intimately well and tracking how they change over time allows you to
learn how to read the search results
appreciate and understand general algorithmic trends
be one of the first people to know when the relevancy algorithms change in a major way
Check out the video after the jump to see how it works:
There has been a lot of debate I have been seeing lately about quantity over quality in the amount of blogging and quality of our writing that we bloggers do.
I’ve been blogging for 1053 days so that’s an average of 11.2 11.6 posts per day. When I started out (for the first year) my posting rate was much lower than this - the past 12 months have been something of a posting frenzy.
I will say at this point - that apart from a few reposted articles and duplicate postings (plus of course my guest bloggers work last month) these have all been hand written posts. I don’t use any automated posting system (I’m pretty anti them).
If you look at a lot top blogs going around, they do break many of the reasons that were given for people unsubscribing. This particularly is so for ‘too many posts’. For example - if you look at Technorati’s top 100 list you’ll find that the top 10 post an average of 20+ times per day (I’m taking those averages on what they’ve done so far today - so it’s probably higher). So obviously there’s some disconnect between the reasons that ProBlogger give as a reason to unsubscribe and what’s going on in the blogosphere.
There is clearly advantages to both posting a lot daily or posting less with focus on quality. But do understand quality isn’t everything. Sometimes, people “like” to skim most of your blog posts until one headline catches their eyes.
As you’ve probably heard a hundred times “Content is King”! I personally believe that this is true. Yes you have to do marketing, but in the end, if you have really good content, your blog will be read because others will market it for you. Eventually, I settled at two posts a day, which allows me to write a good quantity of posts, but at the same time maintain my standard of quality for each post.
You go look at his blog and look at some of his stats and how quickly he grew his blog, you will know what I mean. Aseem claims he’s making $100 from AdSense these days and it only took him 6 months!
Quality over Quantity - if you’re a niche blogger, prioritizing quality over quantity is a must. It doesn’t matter how frequent you post (of course, must be a acceptable frequency! not once per year!!) if you post ‘em good. Remember, snipers don’t waste too many bullets to get something done. Accuracy of the shot and quality of the post is the key.
It’s true and I completely agree that blogging is the same. If you have lots of money to throw away, you can hire 30 bloggers to post 30+ daily “quality” posts, which is what the Top 100 bloggers in the world are doing.
But if you don’t have that money, you might be better off hiding in the bushes and sniping off your target one by one. The better the sniper you are, the better niche blogger you will be and blogged about.
In all, I think 3 to 5 blog posts per day is necessary in order for your blog to rise in popularity, crawled often by search engines like Google, and also provide enough information for people to browse through.
However, if you are blogging about something completely ‘niche’, some topics like “The Athlete’s Foot Blog”, then you might get away with 1 or 2 posts per day.
Above examples are simply for reference but in my experience, I have tried both gattling gun and the sniper method. The problems exists for both methods since the number of your daily posts increase, readers are less likely to comment and interact within the blog unless that readership is big like Engadget or ValleyWag.
On the other hand, sniping 1 post per day is not such a good idea since it only tells Google that your site is updated once per day. You need to let that Google robot crawler thingee that your blog is updated at least every couple hours, if not every hour.
So, the question is, how many posts per day do you blog and do you focus on quantity or quality?
I used to average 30+ blog posts over at Zedomax.com, which is what my blogger friend Phillip over at Makezine.com was doing. But I have settled down for less for quality, around 3 to5 posts, meaning I only try to post the “really funny or interesting” posts, not all the tech posts.
I hope this helps your blog get on the right track now. (or did I confuse you?)
A lot of SEO companies, especially those that have been around for while, will sell you SEO services with promise to get you on the first page of Google.
What those SEO companies really do is buy links for you and re-sell them to you at higher price. Now, if those are lifetime links, it might be okay but if they are not, you are screwed.
Although I am not a total expert as I am not a solely SEO guy, I can tell you from my experiences blogging that PageRank is something you can’t buy.
Of course, you can go out there and buy some text links from such companies as TLA or other text link brokers, but this is like putting cocaine in your body.
Why?
Think of it this way. Everytime you snort those drugs, it will get you high for a short period of time, as soon as you your high is gone, you are worse off than you were before.
SEO is the same thing. Google doesn’t rank you because you have so many links coming in, their algorithm constantly changes to give users “the best content” when a user types in some keywords. You can buy links but how long is that going to last? Even if you did have millions of dollars, you are basically throwing all of that into the toilet the minute you start hyping up your blog or website with “text link” steroids.
So how do you go about it?
Here’s some guidelines that can help you get higher PageRank and also get #1 on Google for your target keywords:
1.Don’t buy text-links. Network with bloggers in the same topic as yours and “trade” blogrolls.
That’s right. Blogrolls are probably the most often overlooked free links you can get. Blogrolls are great because you are usually dealing with your blogger friends, who are trying to achieve the same goals as you are. And, they won’t spam their own site for those reasons.
Every time you communicate with another blogger, whether that IM, Entrecard, or whatever, see if you can get him to trade blogrolls with you.
This is probably the most important step for you to take right now, especially if your blog is brand new and your PageRank is zero.
Even if you trade blogrolls with PR0 blogs, you might find yourself lucky one day if your blogger friend gets PR6.
Everytime you write a post on your blog, you send out “pings” to Technorati and other blog ping services. (These are great for backlinks by the way.)
Now, if you had blogrolls made of 30 “blogroll trades”, everytime your blogger friend writes a post, you get “pinged”! (That’s 30 backlinks if every one of your blogger friends posted 1 article per day.)
2. Content is King. Write great articles that will interest people to read your blog or website.
From what I’ve seen, no matter how poor your PR is, if your content is good, people will read and your PageRank will go up. (because people will link to you)
Another thing, great articles are good but you need to post daily to get more PageRank.
Quality is probably more important than quantity if you want more readers.
Quantity, on the other hand, can get you more traffic faster.
Quality is great but if you only post 1 article per day, each with 10 tags, that’s the density of your keywords and tags read by Google and other search engines.
But let’s say you write 10 articles per day, each again with 10 tags. That’s about 10 times more tags. Tags are probably more important than anything else these days.
I find that Google indexes your content and later discards most of it when your post gets older and older but Google keeps the tags.
Anyways, the most important part is that you write great content, and the more posts, the merrier.
If you have a long article, try to break them down into 2-3 posts. That way, you will get more traffic in the long run AND your article is still quality first.
3. Link a lot to active bloggers who respond back to you
That right, you want to link to active bloggers who are likely link back to you.
For example, you find a blog post that you find interesting on the web, you link to it and write a blog post.
The blog you linked to blogs back in return.
Pretty simple but if you do this more and more daily, you will get lots of more links and more blogger friends who will help you in the long run.
Next time, we will go into more depth on how you can get your blog or website to be #1 on Google for your target keyword.
Wow, it’s been a fun ride with our new site, SiteHoppin.com. Although we haven’t really made that much money off traffic, the good news is that we’ve “doubled” our network traffic as whole in just 2 weeks since SiteHoppin’s public beta launch!
It’s great that our traffic is going up, but how can this help you? Go submit your blog posts at SiteHoppin‘. (The more you bookmark, the more it will get distributed to the SiteHoppers)
Zedomax Network, a Web2.0 Web 2.5 company based out of San Francisco, breaks through 16K unique visitors for the day on January 11th, 2008, one day right after the founder Max’s birthday.
Thanks to their new site, SiteHoppin’, which brought more than 10K unique visitors for the day, contributing to the Zedomax Network.
Check it out if you want to see our site being revamped live.
On another great note for year 2008 and 4am in the morning, we got a new knol project called http://knolproject.net. Right now, we don’t have anything on there but we are planning to “open-source” the paid wiki concept to let everyone get in the new “paid wiki” wave. Basically, we will teach you how to make a wiki site like the One Buck Wiki or the new Google Knol Project. We are currently accepting any freelance developers to contribute and share ideas for the site so if you are interested in community development, shoot us an email at zedomax [at] gmail.com and you will be included in our exclusive list of developers for the new open source project.
In this special post, we will tell you how you can increase your PageRank!
NOTE: Although we admit that there are many “standardized” methods, this method was learned through experience and actual trial-and-error by SEO experts at Zedomax Network.
So here’s your TOP5 List of Things to do and watch for when trying to increase your PageRank:
1. Link to high PR blogs and sites. (In other words, linking massively to websites with high PageRanks is a very good thing) Install the Google Toobar if you don’t know what PageRank is. (It’s that little bar that says PageRank.)
2. BE VERY AWARE OF incoming comments, pings, and trackbacks from other blogs and social networking sites.
In other words, you have to only let “real” blogs and “real” websites link to you. If you have any doubt the sites is a splog (spam blog), or a scraper site, you will want to not let that person, blog, or website leave any trace behind.
3. Google Algorithm is simple. The more links you have coming in, the better. The more links you have going out to high PRs, the better.
This is slightly different from the conventional, “the number of links coming in divided by the number of links going out.” Google somehow ranks you higher if you link to high PR sites and this is what “we” learned through time and trial/error.
Even splogs can help your PageRank as long as you are not linking back to them.
4. Write posts on recent “big” event that’s considered brand new. Doing this automatically gets you some traffic since it’s something new.
For example, if iPod just came out and you were the very first blogger who wrote about it, I bet you are still pulling in traffic from Google. This type of “iPod” keyword can easily boost your PageRank and get lots of traffic.
5. Use the above advices today and take action!
How do you know if it’s working? Well, using all the possible measurement systems today, you’d probably still wouldn’t be able to compute it. But, you will start to notice that you start getting more search terms from Google daily. (Yes, that means your PageRank IS going up.)
Higher PageRank = More Traffic
It’s that simple although there are exceptions with some high PR sites that don’t get as much traffic as others. But we theorize that PageRank is directly correlated with Traffic.
Right now, there’s the new project by Google, Knol Project. We will actually doing this on our older brother site, Zedomax.com. We are trying to see if we can show up #1 on Google for “Knol Project” since it’s so new.
