Alexa Finally Changes Ranking Engine

…and by that I mean it looks like they’ve actually BUILT a ranking engine to surpass the feeble Alexa Toolbar as the only measure of a site’s value.

I was one of, if not the first, to caution people when Alexa started that the rankings were based only on people who had the tool bar installed. These were predominantly webmasters. So sites that webmasters frequented fared well, like mine, in Alexa while others had terrible rankings. (The sites website owners weren’t likely to ever visit but the rest of the web was.)

This is why huge sites could have surprisingly low Alexa rankings and heavily niched sites, like mine, could have incredibly good rankings with far less actual traffic.

It appears Alexa is now using different sources for their rankings. My ranking went from the 30,000 range to the 60,000 range as a result.

But that’s probably fair and I welcome the change because, if it is universal, my 67,000 or so ranking is still going to be remarkable compared to the rest of the web. This is given that I have such a specialized site which doesn’t get a heck of a lot of visitors compared to, say, Digg.com.

Want to read up on the latest reports on the Alexa rankings change? Let me whip out my Utility Poster software and grab the best stories for you.

Alexa Ranking News from the Sphere…

Alexa Changes it Up

Alexa, the white elephant metric site that everybody loves to hate, announced today that they would be making a change to the way that their metrics are compiled. We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings …

Alexa Changes Rankings Criteria Announcement

I guess it is fair though and I’m still happy with the change despite it negatively affecting my rankings. I’ve said before that Alexa rankings were useless to some extent due to the bias of people using the toolbar; now hopefully they …

Alexa changes their rankings

I went to Alexa to check the ranking and they have an announcement on their website that they did change the algorithm that calculates their rankings. I never dreamed of making it into the first 10K websites in the world and although …

Alexa changes website ranking system

Alexa will no longer measure data based on users of the Alexa toolbar, rather ranking sites based on aggregating data from various sources. Alexa announced the changes this past week, noting that many websites will notice significant …

Alexa changes ranking system - More sources than the toolbar

Alexa is the Web statistics tool that everyone checks but no-one really likes very much. Mainly because the stats were only compiled from people who installed the Alexa toolbar. But that’s all changed, and Alexa has now overhauled its …

Alexa Changes Ranking System

Because they only used the toolbar to determine a sites’ ranking, they have been highly criticized and many people have discounted the benefit and usefulness of Alexa saying that it is inaccurate. People have been asking Alexa to change …

Alexa Changes it’s Ranking System

Alexa announced that they have revised their ranking system. There are lots of negative comments about the previous algorithm of Alexa that is why, others are not trusting their algorithm. Will this changes , change the perception with …

Alexa changes website ranking system

Alexa announced the changes this past week, noting that many websites will notice significant changes in their rankings. Although the service has been popular with smaller sites, which don’t qualify for Nielsen rankings, critics have …

Alexa Ranking Changes - What effect will it have for Bloggers?

Please find below a summary of the changes AU refers to the Australian Alexa rank and X refers to the global Alex rank. While I have calculated the changes to last update’s top 100, I don’t want to post that until I’ve had a chance to …

Alexa Changes Rankings, Goes Beyond Dreaded Toolbar

The folks at Alexa have announced that their ever so popular (but, many might argue, often inaccurate) ranking system for web sites has been altered. The official word on the changes is slightly vague: Alexa claims “better rankings,” …

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Tags: alexa, alexa rankings

Reverse Split Testing

Guest Blogger: Thomas Deeter

I wish I had thought of this because it is truly simple and fantastic! The credit, however, goes to Glenn Livingston.

If you are not on his list, you missed a brilliant insight.

This one powerful (and free) research method could “viagrafy” your conversions and justify a top spot on AdWords, which, of course, leads to lots o’ sales.

Reverse Engineering for Affiliate Marketers

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what the #1 affiliate marketer in your niche did to his/her web site (tweaks to the copy, changes in the offer, adjustments to the images, etc.) that put them at the top of the PPC campaign that’s either sinking you to page 3 of the SERPs or yanking $2 a click from your tight marketing budget?

Step 1

You’ve probably performed this first step many times…

Go to Google search, type in your niche’s main search term and see who pops up in the top AdWords spot. (For reasons I’ll explain in a minute, make sure the top performer is not listed in the organic listings.)

The question you’re trying to answer in this initial step? “What is the highest AdWords listing that is not also on the organic results?”.

Now that you know who is kicking up the most dust in the paid search engine listings, its time to spy.

Most online marketers have heard of split-testing. Basically, it involves testing multiple variables on a web site, find out what works; keep the best and ditch the rest. The down side of split-testing? Yes, it takes what most affiliate marketers hate the most….WORK!

This “reverse split-testing” research method allows you, as a nosy marketer, to quickly peek at the incremental changes your main competitor(s) have made as they have marched to the top of the paid SERP listings.

Step 2

Go to Alexa.com and type in the domain of the top affiliate website in your niche (from above) into the “Movers and Shakers Traffic Graph” on the main page. Select the Page Views tab and notice the results.

Now, select the time period that allows you to see the entire “life” of that web site. Then, look for the dips (and significant traffic increases).

The dips presumably indicate the times that the webmaster had the site down for improvements based on split testing or, perhapsTaguchi testing that had been done. I say presumably because…you don’t dominate a niche by accident. If they are at the top, you can be sure they did some sort of testing and tweaking to get there.

SIDE NOTE: This ties in to why you can’t use this method to research web sites that rank well on the organic listings. By nature, organic traffic is much more consistent than AdWords traffic so there won’t be any significant dips in traffic even when the webmaster pulls the site down for tweaks. Take a look at www.jackhumphrey.com on Alexa. Lots of spikes, no major dips. Why? Is it because Jack hasn’t done any split-testing or made changes to the website…? I doubt it. Take a look at the Wayback Machine, you’ll see lots of changes to the site. The Friday Traffic Report is an organic listings monster…Jack does not have to pay for traffic, he gets it for free. Therefore, his traffic is much more consistent.

OK, back on track… Most affiliate products are sold via landing pages and for these sites, this method is pure platinum.

Now for the last, and most intriguing, step…

Step 3

Jot down the approximate dates of those “dips” that you spied on the Alexa Traffic Chart. Now, sail over to the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/web/web.php and type in the domain name of the web site you’re researching. Up pops a few columns with a long list of dates.

What is this?

Well, the Wayback Machine has kindly taken nice little snapshots in time of the web site in question. Now, for the best part…

Using your list of dates, you can actually see with your own eyeballs all the changes made by the webmaster from one dip to another. Look closely at what was changed from one iteration of the web site to another.

•  Did the headline change?
•  Did the call to action change?
•  Did the guarantee change?
•  Was audio or video added?
•  What did the webmaster ditch from the site and what did he keep, etc…?

Make a list of your significant discoveries and guess what you have?
A beautiful behind the scenes list of results of what was probably an intensive (and obviously grandly successful) split-testing campaign.

One final step!

Take this lucrative data and put the principles to practice on your site and knock your competition off their snooty perch.

And the best part is…now that you know the secrets of the big guns, it will be much easier to improve your site’s AdWords ranking and conversion rate without wasting time trying to fix things that should have been ditched a long time ago.

Tags: adwords, alexa, reverse split testing, split testing, taguchi method

New Free SEO Backlink Checker And More

I have added a cool little tool that not only checks your backlinks listed in the major engines, but also:

• Checks your pagerank and Alexa rankings at a glance
• Checks your search engine saturation
• Checks for bookmarks to you and blog posts linking to you
• Checks keyword placement in the engines

It’s a tiny little gadget with a whole lot of power.  Enjoy and tell your friends where to find it!

Tags: alexa, backlink checker, google, keyword saturation, search engine saturation, seo tools