This was especially significant for me at the time, because I was struggling with a problem which I couldn’t solve.

A few days later 5ubliminal posted, “If I Told You… I’d Have To Kill You” – a simlar idea, again specific to SEO techniques but with a few hints to how you can work out what others are up to… without them telling you.

My End Of year Problem

Lots of sites were publishing their year end stats, showing which were their most popular posts for the year, traffic numbers etc, and many of them were missing one, and in many cases many important statistics that can be used to determine the success of a particular post.

I didn’t post a yearly roundup – it would have been a lie

I know which are my most successful posts based upon various metrics, and the metrics I use are in many cases different to the metrics other people use, and I can use them for competitive intelligence

I wasn’t prepared to write a post highlighting my most popular posts for the year, or the ones I wanted to highlight, if I couldn’t be 100% honest about my methods.

Scribd

The changes Scribd made after the revealing Stompernet videos were really the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you release information without a great deal of restraint on how that information should be used, it can cause problems, and sometimes various tactics and methods stop working, or are prevented from working.

Release The Information In Private?

This is one option I have considered – it would be easy to set up a membership site, or use a report such as this just for list building, or even give it to a number of membership sites I am a member of as a bonus, but that introduces secondary problems.

I am not a programmer

I have worked with programming teams for years, but I can only tinker with code these days. If I released the information to just a few hundred, or possibly a few thousand, there would be 2 very specific problems.

• Only about 10% of the people receiving the information would be able to do anything useful with it – this stuff is a little bit technical, and even once I have all my data together it takes time playing around in excel to really benefit from it, and realise the significance.
• My limited use of these methods flies under the radar – if you have a few 100, or 1000 people mining the same data, it would throw up a huge red flag, quite needlessly, as many would be looking for data on exactly the same websites.

If I make the information available, the ideal solution would be

• A 20 page report
• A viable proxy based extraction and storage system for compiling data
• Various tools, possibly in Excel, to make manipulating the data relatively easy for less technical folk

Oh, Andy Is Going To Sell An Ebook?

Ebooks work for newbie stuff and basic training, or techniques that get hyped but are not necessarily for your average users (even if they are effective)

This isn’t something I want to hype about, and it certainly isn’t basic training

The financial model just wouldn’t cover the development costs

I could also include it in a membership site of my own, but it isn’t something that would stand on its own, I need a lot more time to get together complimentary materials.

With the new year people are planning their course of action for 2008, and this would prove a benefit for their content planning strategy.

Content For Your Membership Site or Agency

Do you remember the days before the junk peddlers of private label rights and bundled master resale rights products when content really had value?

These days the people who create exceptional content only provide it via higher end membership sites, and most, but not all of the ebooks are beginners guides – they can still be good value, but that isn’t the kind of content I want to create.

Over the last year writing this blog I have received a number of proposals of various kinds from membership site owners looking for specialist content, which is why I am considering a slight return to the old ways of providing content to a limited number of partners for a fee that is just a “drop in the ocean” compared to the fees members pay for access to great content, and certainly much better value than retaining me on a permanent basis.

Price – contact me by email for details – I expect to spend up to $5000 on development of the scripts and tools, though depending on the way they are designed, I might also have to provide hosting. I would much prefer to have a comfortable budget for development than to be scraping the barrel.
On top of that I will also be offering support if you provide me access to your member area – there is certainly some 2-way benefit

Initially I am not going to set a specific limit on numbers, but ideally I would like to have the report and tools made available to between 10 and 20 membership sites or agencies

I am including search marketing agencies, because they often have lots of people working with clients with whom they want to share tools and reports. Hopefully a few of the more popular SEO membership sites will pick this up anyway, so small agencies can benefit from their existing memberships, but for larger corporations it would probably be best to purchase your own license.

For further details and possibly a few examples those who have my email can just email me, or you can just use my contact form

I am going to be selective about where this information and tools will be made available

To finish, just one example:-

Which one post was my most successful in 2007? This isn’t 100% accurate because like with all statistical measures there can be extenuating circumstances that mess with the data, and using this method there are frequent occurances within the top10, in much the same way a front page Digg can make a blog seem more popular than it really is.

The Tale of Little Linkalot and Some Blogging Thoughts where I actually linked through to another one of Donna’s posts, “The Tale of Little Linkalot”

If you can work out why I regard that (based on this method) as my most successful post, a “cornerstone” or in some ways “tipping point”, bully for you, but don’t go spreading it around too much ;)
Even if you can work it out, you are going to appreciate a 20 page report on how to use this method to share with your members or clients, and the tools to go with it.

I could have just written a short blog post with my top 50 stories of 2007, provided details for compiling the data, and a very rough excel spreadsheet and a few charts, but it would not be very usable for the majority of non-programming geeks, and the method would be burned or limited within a few hours or days.

Why burn a great method just for a few links?

Adage Power 150

Over the last few days for instance I noticed that Advertising Age have rejigged their Adage Power150 which I previously discussed a few months ago. It is great to see that Google PageRank has a lot less importance, and the inclusion of Yahoo link data, but there is an over reliance on Technorati.

Technorati is easily gamed, because they count links from the sidebar and footer, which can easily be encouraged by creating widgets and WordPress Themes. They do try to clean up their own Top 100 list, manually removing blogs that seem to have an overbearing number of links from viral content.
There are also some aspects of how a theme is designed that have a huge affect on how many links Technorati claim from a single blog, or the number of blogs that Technorati think are at a single domain.
Technorati currently accounts for 70 of the possible 150 total points a blog can receive, and the top ranking blogs can gain close to a full quota, unlike PageRank for which only 6 or 7 points can reasonably be attained.

You will notice that a lot of the Yahoo references show zero – values returned from an API need to be cached and discounted if they are zero, or return a number that is a significant change. I have seen Yahoo numbers drop from 30K links down to less than 9K, only for them to rebound.
It should also be noted that Yahoo also give credit for nofollow links from places like Delicious, Stumbleupon, and even blog comments. Not all links are created equal.

There is a bonus with the changes – I have gone from around 30 on the list to 17 or 18, and Adage is a low but consistent traffic source and has certainly extended my reach with new subscribers.

Top 100 Make Money Blogs

Another list that sends traffic daily is Mark’s, but again it suffers from a number of anomalies.

First of all PageRank plays a visible factor, or I am sure Yaro would be placed a few points higher, he used to be a PR6, and whilst it might not affect position so much, I have highlighed the other sites that currently have a penalty.

There also seems to be a problem with the Technorati rating on a number of blogs being much lower than it should be. I am not sure if this is a canonical domain problem, or some kind of new factor being applied to specific domains for data accessed by API.

Niches

Many niches don’t link out as much as meta blogging and technology blogs, and those in related niches such as venture capital.

As an example regular reader Lucia also has a knitting blog – I know that at times she gets 3 or 4 times as much traffic as me, even without social media influence.

PR3 (I remember it being a 4?), Technorati rank 44,000 (141 blog reactions), Alexa around 200K

The current statistical measures people use just don’t relate to the vast majority of bloggers.

Existing Stats Are Not Accurate?

Alexa is based upon toolbar usage – though their own toolbar isn’t very useful for many people, webmasters in the meta blogging niche can recommend the highly useful Search Status toolbar for Firefox that feeds Alexa with the same data.

Compete used to suffer from poor uptake of their Firefox toolbar because of problems with Firefox, but when Compete was added to the Search Status toolbar, again meta blogging and SEO blogs saw a boost.

With Technorati being used as a factor in so many monetization services, various methods have been used to boost links from other bloggers. Whilst they might get manually edited out of the top100 blogs on Technorati (and I have written how to avoid this several months ago), their numbers still get reported through the API though there is no guarantee that will last forever.

What would top bloggers do if the API for Technorati starts to report zero for anyone that Technorati feel is gaming the system?

Quantcast

Quantcast is accurate, but only if you include their tracking code on your blog and get “Quantified”

If you don’t, you end up claiming they are inaccurate in your end of year stats ;) – sorry Rand, I couldn’t resist that one.

If you compare our data and the SELand data to what Compete, Quantcast or Alexa are reporting, you can see how tragically inaccurate those services are. Sadly, that’s no anomally. Everytime I get access to a client’s visit data, I’m always curious to check the three and have not once found accuracy, even on a relative basis. Third party traffic metrics still have a very, very long way to go.

Just to give you an idea of what happens if you don’t add tracking code to get quantified, here is a comparison between this domain and DoshDosh, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land & SEOmoz.

note:the Quantcast images will display much clearer in a feed reader, they are limited on display width on the blog and forced to a smaller size

Search Engine Land traffic is directly measured, as is my own, the other sites are just a panel estimate. As SEL effectively makes the others almost invisible, lets replace SEL with Marketing Pilgrim

You can see some clear traffic spikes in the panel estimates, probably due to click traffic from other sites which have Quantcast code embedded such as Digg

In fact of the major social news and bookmarking sites, only Digg and Propeller are Quantified.

Why IzeaRanks IS Needed, But Might Be Rejected

When you create a page on a blog to help you sell your advertising inventory, how can an advertiser trust the traffic figures you give them, and why should they have to research whether you in some way gamed the statistics?

If you are a large publisher and it is a significant advertiser, you might be willing to give them access to some real statistics, such as Google Analytics through shared access, or your advertising administration system might provide reasonable stats to advertisers. As an example B5Media use Valueclick – I would hope Valueclick have some tools to provide statistics that can be verified before an advertiser makes a purchase.

Certainly Problogger isn’t listed as Quantified

For smaller publishers it would be possible for them to use existing services like Quantcast, but they don’t, because using Quantcast isn’t being encouraged by the people that count… the monetization services and advertisers.

For all the negative publicity Izea has had due to their PayPerPost service, one thing remains clear – they are an advertising company looking to help bloggers make money. They are not a competitor.

I would be more worried if I was placing tracking code on my blog if Izea in some way were a competitor creating content, such as Performancing with their Metrics service, which Izea themselves almost purchased though then it was a different animal, and not just a branded version of an existing tracking service.

I am a firm believer in not making things too easy for competitors, well with this blog I don’t care so much, but certainly for niche sites. I don’t worry too much about monetization services gaining stats, and I never looked on MyBlogLog having access being a problem. I am not sure if Blogcatalog are collecting anything, but again, they are not exactly running a blog network.

The IzeaRanks interface is honestly pretty basic compared to what is offered by Quantcast as far as raw traffic stats, and you are certainly missing all the segmentation data (though I am not sure how reliable that is).

Izea’s “RealRank” is based upon the following factors (from their announcement)

• 70% weighted towards visitors per day
• 20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
• 10% weighted towards pageviews per day

I am not sure whether Izea have come up with a way to have only “Real” pageviews and visitors counted, as many stats packages have problems with the pre-fetching of pages from Stumbleupon causing massive errors.

The active inbound links is an interesting statistic. Links that deliver real traffic. It is relatively easy to build up links and gain PageRank from obscure sites, or to game rankings with themes and widgets, but those links rarely get clicked on by visitors. Even blogrolls are pretty much ignored by visitors unless you have an unfair advantage of your sitename starting with the letter A ;)

Many people state that the value of RealRank will be based upon how many bloggers use it. That is partially true, but the real traffic and unique visitor values will be valuable to advertisers even if just one blogger signed up for the service.

I am disappointed that Izea are not doing anything with feeds, though it is much easier to do that with WordPress blogs than blogs on Blogspot, especially with the way Google have now integrated Blogger and Feedburner. The technical skill that would be needed to feed a feed into izea and back out to Feedburner would cause countless technical support problems, and Izea have enough technical support problems with some of their other services, and no end of headaches.

There is an API, I am sure some smart people will jump on it and use it to provide something useful, though I am not sure how quickly that will happen. The usage restrictions of 5000 calls per day is generous.

It is true that Google might currently look on javascript from Izea as an indication of writing paid posts, but hopefully with Social Spark that will be cleared up. Social Spark will offer total transparency. If you are doing nothing wrong, it probably isn’t going to be a major problem even if Google clock up even more false positives for a short while. If you are doing something naughty, you are probably going to be caught anyway.

Do You Have An Advertising Sales Page?

If you have an advertising sales page on your blog, have no doubt that advertisers will start to expect the availability of real statistics, not something you quote from AWStats.
AWStats typically reports around 6x as many page views compared to javascript based tracking on my blog, and quite a few more unique visitors.

You could include Quantcast, but you might as well include IzeaRank at the same time especially if some smart people come up with a way to present the stats effectively.
I can see Paul’s point at Mashable, that Izea maybe should have concentrated on the whole of the internet, and not just the blogosphere, but you could argue that the BBC or the Washington Post should be included in the Technorati Top100 as well, because they offer RSS feeds.

In my mind the individual rating of blogs by RealRank is meaningless unless it it put into context of their topical niche, such as I could compare Mashable with Techcrunch on Quantcast and discover that neither are quantified, so the statistics are totally worthless.

I can understand why Darren doesn’t necessarily need it, or other B5 Media Blogs, but many niche bloggers do need something they can use to demonstrate their relative worth. Just a week ago a key tip from Shoemoney on Darren’s blog was about a clear advertising page.

Is there a difference between clear and transparent/honest/uncoloured ?

How much creative license should people use to sell advertising?

I am sure a lot of people have actually read the story by now because Darren linked through and Jordan remixed the statistics a little.

What struck me the most was that 29% have never been on the front page of Digg.

8 Blogs in the Technorati Top 100 are none English, and some of those as you would expect make up the largest percentage of blog that haven’t made the front page, but there are still 17% English blog that haven’t made it.

I would love to know which blogs have never made a front page that are in that Top100, as they deserve some Diggs.

Secondly of course it does need to be mentioned that there are 10s, possibly hundreds of quality blogs that for one reason or another have been barred from reaching the Technorati Top100 list.

A month or so ago I wrote about how to prevent being banned by Technorati and still retain most or all of the link juice you might get from various forms of viral marketing.

If you feel you have a chance of being in the Top100 in 6 months or a year’s time, I feel it is not worth throwing it away, although of course there are other gambits such as switching to a new domain name once you have built us a following, as it will most likely only take a few months to regain those links (it didn’t take long for Robert Scoble)

The only time I actually test the Compete Toolbar is when I get an upgrade for it. Firefox detects a new upgrade, downloads it, and switches the toolbar on automatically from its default state on my computer – off.

The reason I keep it switched off is because with the Compete Toolbar switched on, Google Reader doesn’t work. It has been a good 3 months since Paul noted a problem. I just downloaded a new version, and again it doesn’t work with Google Reader on my system.

Compete Statistics

I have been disappointed with Compete Statistics for some time, especially within various niches that are technology related.

I decided to do a little roundup of blogs in the SEO SEM & Make Money Niche – no disrespect to anyone I missed out, page load time is going to suck anyway with all these images. Some sites I checked out and they fell into line with others which have similar Alexa traffic, so I just kept one example.

Problogger.net

Current Alexa Rating:- 2309

Shoemoney.com

Current Alexa Rating:- 1281

Graywolf

Current Alexa Rating:- 4993

Pronet Advertising

Current Alexa Rating:- 10015

Search Engine Journal

Current Alexa Rating:- 4264

John Battelle’s Search Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7684

Search Engine Watch

Current Alexa Rating:- 957

TopRank Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7610

Andy Beard

Current Alexa Rating:- 32K going on 20k

Statistics Analysis

The Alexa stats just don’t tie up with the Compete stats, even in a similar niche. Why do SEJ and SEW do so much better than Problogger and Shoemoney on Compete scores when both have very high (and legitimate) Alexa scores?
John Battelle stats are fascinating – he has a huge number of subscribers based on his recent stats from a few days ago after Google Reader was included but his Alexa score and number of comments doesn’t match. John seems to have a different kind of reader.

Do corporate intranets and default feeds on start pages (before you sign up) get somehow added to subscriber data?

I have always looked on the number of comments as being a good indication for blogs as to whether Alexa data is consistant, and generally within this niche it is, with the exception of John Battelles stats. I can think of reasons for that, as he is a “trusted” news source.

It should also be noted that Compete is a relatively new service, younger than all of the sites listed. I didn’t include SearchEngineLand specifically because it is a new site and thus might not have been a fair comparison.

As for my own data… wow, I am in the top 1 million now for Compete.

I feel much more inclined to use Alexa data as an indicator over Compete, not only because I can actually use it without breaking Google Reader, but also because the statistics for Alexa at least seem to have some level of consistency.

Time to close Firefox to switch Compete off again until the next update.

Update: I have now added Quantcast figures

Quantcast

Quantcast is a strange entity, in that the figures for traffic can be highly accurate. I know the figures they have for my site are 100% accurate. The reason they have exact data for my site is because I have been running their tracking code on my site for the last month and have my site registered with them.

For sites that aren’t registered and running the tracking code, the data is fairly weak – I am not sure where they get the data from, but it seems to be fairly dubious.

Its another piece of code you end up placing in the footer of your site, and I am sure the tin-foil hat brigade are not too happy about sharing everything about their sites, but it seems Quantcast get the data even if you don’t use their tracking code. It is probably best to register and then decide which data to display.
Lots of data isn’t always displayed for lower ranked sites – that certainly seems to be the case with this site.

From the Quantcast FAQ

How can I fix my site profile?

There is a sure-fire way to improve the accuracy of these numbers: by placing a measurement pixel on your site. Add a pixel and let our technology do the rest. Within just a few days you’ll see more refined, accurate and representative numbers for your site’s audience.

How accurate their ratings are for sites that experience a growth in traffic are unknown, and the drops in reported traffic on some sites are strange. Where you host seems to make a difference with how much data they have if you don’t have the code installed.

Update2: Conversion Rater has been doing a similar analysis trying to create a rankings table based on this data. Unfortunately it isn’t taking into account why some of the metrics data might be totally inaccurate, such as sites not registered with Quantcast.
Clarification: Pat does mention screwy data for sites not including Quantcast code, but the way he says it suggests that this is affecting those on his list that have a 15,000,000 rating. Of the 16 sites on the list, only 4 might have registered with Quantcast. It is just not worth using the figure. Comepete seems to be all over the place as well, with 6 sites not having any data at all.

Yesterday it was announced that Google have managed to untangle their various crawlers and can now report feed usage stats to services like Feedburner. Further coverage on Techcrunch, Mashable, SearchEngineLand and Techmeme.

FeedBurner Readership Prior to Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

It is unfortunate that I don’t have screen captures of all of the following, although I am sure the specific sites I mention will be reporting their own data shortly.

Techcrunch – from memory had between 150k and 170k subscribers being reported
Mashable – from memory had approximately 51k subscribers

For my own stats it is much easier because I have a FeedBurner Pro account

“Reach” currently seems to correspond with how many clicks you have on the site, and not how many unique readers or how many page views on the site.

Here are my MyBlogLog stats from the same day:-

FeedBurner Readership After Inclusion of Google Reader Stats

Techcrunch

Whilst my estimate of previous reported subscribers might be out by 10K, overnight Techcrunch have gained approximately 100K subscribers. This is close to a 60% gain

Mashable

Mashable seem to have gained around 10K subscribers, or approximately a 20% gain

Andy Beard

In this case I have more detailed information

The addition of Google Reader Stats represents a 32% gain

Conclusions

There seems to be a huge variation in the demographics for each site which is actually very refreshing. Techcrunch obviously have a very high population of Google Reader subscribers, and they have given Google Reader significant coverage. Mashable have also given Google Reader significant coverage, but their readership is potentially different, with more emphasis on social networks, and potentially a younger audience.

My own site is relatively new, and also caters for a different demographic audience, of people relatively new to blogging, and also a lot of people who are less familiar with reading RSS feeds.

Whilst the information I have isn’t conclusive, and such figures might only be forthcoming if Feedburner aggregate their statistics and make them public, it seems to me that Google Reader may well have the largest user base in the Feed Reader market, less than 6 months after they updated their user interface.
Google Reader certainly seems very popular among new adopters, and that is actually the largest potential market.

I am not alone in drawing these conclusions, as it seems Steve Boyd and Jeremy Wright (B5 Media) have reported similar gains.

With B5 media it will be interesting which properties gained the most overnight. I have a similar but slightly different demographic to Problogger.net.
Darrens subscribers seem to have shot up by more than the average for B5 Media – Before the Google Reader statistics were introduced, Darren had quite significant gains in readership, and was approaching close to 12K readers.

He is now approaching 19K subscribers:-

This is close to a 60% gain overnight

Jeremy also gave a very interesting breakdown of the top subscription method by each demographic audience:-

One of the great things, though, is that we can actually break these numbers down by some vertical-specific info. I won’t do this for all our channels, but to give a brief view into some different demo/psycho-graphics, here are 3 of our largest channels with their top 3 feed readers:

Business: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Technology: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Entertainment: Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Desktop, Google Feedfetcher

And a few of our smaller channels, with diverse interests?

Arts & Crafts: Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, My Yahoo
Personal Development: Google Feedfethcer, Bloglines, Firefox Live Bookmarks
Travel & Culture: Bloglines, Google Feedfetcher, unidentified (followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks)

I wonder if other blog networks will be so open with their information, as I find this fascinating, especially the lack of IE7 users in Jeremy’s stats, despite its supposed lead over Firefox.

I should also link over to the Feedburner blog, because they explain how their statistics work.

Update 06/25/2007

Duncan Riley just linked through to this post in an article on Techcrunch, so I thought it would be appropriate to make a small update.

The initial stats listed above are from 4 months ago, lets see how things have changed.

The obvious thing looking at the follow statistics is that my subscriber base has more than doubled, in fact I could claim my number of subscribers is growing faster than Techcrunch!

The fact that Techcrunch gain more subscribers per day than I have in total is just a minor issue of very little importance.

Among my own readership, Google Reader’s market share has actually increased to 38%, and because my subscriber base has increased, those numbers are now from a bigger market sample, though admittedly still a very heavy technology focus.

I should also note that those numbers are not influenced at all by default subscription packages from many feed readers, which can have a dramatic effect on subscriber number balance and the total number of active subscribers that are reported.

To save me writing more about it, you can head over to Meg’s Blogpond report on new Alexa data.

There is a good reason I am sending you to Meg’s blog – she lives in Australia, and runs sites for an Aussie audience – the country data shows one of her sites is rated 176 in Australia – you would never tell that looking at the normal Alexa rating of around 25k

If you look at my own Alexa data, you will notice I am not gaming my results too much though I am using search status while editing, saving etc which has a small effect. 5% Polish traffic is likely at least 50% me, though I do have a few Polish readers.

But it’s hard to know exactly how popular it’s gotten. FeedBurner doesn’t track it yet, so we can’t compare the subscriber numbers to other readers. We’ve noticed a significant jump in referrals from Google Reader, though. Enough to suggest that it is as large or larger than Bloglines already.

This slant is slightly incorrect

FeedBurner Can’t Track It Yet

It isn’t FeedBurner’s fault that they are not providing readership data for Google Reader as they state clearly in their interface.

This isn’t a technical hurdle, lots of very small companies that provide desktop or web based RSS readers supply this data to FeedBurner.

It seems obvious to me that whilst Google are happy to collect lots of data, and even give you fancy graphs of your own reading habits, they are not inclined to give this information to publishers.

Effectively, once your content is picked up by Google, it enters a black hole.

Some of the review process is going to be quite time consuming. What I plan to do is to create a large niche site with a few 1000 pages of content for testing purposes. It will contain some duplicate content, but hopefully I can “add value” to it in other ways, hmm just like Technorati really.

Reviews of other products might be over multiple pages, with an initial first glance, and then some views in hindsight after using the applications for a period of time.

Checking my own stats the results are actually very similar.

I started using MyBlogLog on November 21st 2006.

Since that time I have had 2936 referred visitors, of which MyBlogLog accounted for 228 or 7.8%

It should be noted that some of those are repeat visitors as a few people use MyBlogLog as a way of browsing blogs,

This doesn’t account for various forms of direct visitors that MyBlogLog doesn’t seem to pick up.

Google Analytics gives me

Visits: 3,292
Pageviews: 6,948

25% of my total traffic are repeat visitors
26% of my traffic comes from Google, with a large percentage of that being long-tail search results.

I have actually had a total of over 1300 different referrers during this time

On a blog with a RSS feed, that isn’t the whole story. Feed Readers cache the pages they fetch, and my feeds are picked up from Feedburner. Readers don’t have to visit your blog to read your content. That is one major readon to use a service like Feed Burner for their statistics.

Here are some more interesting facts.

I am a heavy tagger, but MyBlogLog provides me with twice as much traffic as Technorati.

Technorati provides me with 40% more traffic than Google Blog Search

I have had more traffic from TheGoodBlogs (73 visitors) than Technorati and a similar amount of visitors have left by them (75)

It is a shame that I can’t add a zero to some of these stats, but then I don’t write about Paris Hilton, and my posts are not Digg Bait.

As Mike Sansone frequently points out, MyBlogLog brings in a fair amount of high quality traffic.

Om Malik recently reported on Alexa outages as large as 14 hours.

I still like using Alexa as a way to compare websites. But it is just one yardstick, and should only be used comparing websites in the same niche. If one webmaster uses Alexa and another doesn’t within a small niche, the difference in rating can be extremely high.

Alexa isn’t Just Down

I have noticed over the last week that Alexa wasn’t updating their statistics. They were frozen on 22nd November. Not just my own site statistics, but also for sites like CNN and Google.

Today is the first time that statistics have been updated for 6 days, and Alexa are now shoing statistics for… November 23rd.

This isn’t the same as an outage. There seems to be something going on behind the scenes.
They have still been gathering data, but not displaying the processed results.

Lots of tracking services have some level of delay, Google Analytics has a delay. MyBlogLog has a delay, unless you subscribe to their pro version.

Is this something to do with data centre migration or a technical hitch? If that was the case I would expect to see results today for November up until 28th now that things are moving again.

Alexa May Have Made Changes

The way that the data is appearing suggests to me that maybe Alexa have made some changes in the way data is being processed, and that it will take them a while to catch up.

Only time will tell.