Mr. South
There seems to be a lot of confusion about Alexa Ranks and what it means. Mr. Ross tried incorrectly to point out that he has more traffic than you do. Let me explain Alexa so that even people in porn can understand it:
Your Alexa Rank is simply a snapshot of where your site finishes in the world wide race for traffic. Google for example finishes first with an Alexa Rank of 1, Yahoo is fourth with a rank of 4, twitter is twelfth with an Alexa Rank of 12.
Now lets look at the porn “news” sites
Yours, mikesouth.com, is 73,570 Meaning that of all the websites in all the world Alex believes that there are 73,569 with more traffic than you
Gene Ross at adultfyi has 77.585
Lukeisback is 100,402
avn.com is 26,051
xbiz.com is 24,267
and KylieIreland.com who claims to have 500,000 views a month is 2,662,549
You clearly outrank Gene Ross, but you outrank him by more than you think. Gene requires and extra click to read every article and Alexa factors that in because a visitor spends more time and clicks more pages on his site than on yours. if you both had identical traffic adultfyi would rank significantly better than you, just because of that.
When you claimed that it is easy to “game” Alexa you are correct, if you look at xbiz.com and avn.com it is clear that their Alexa Ranks are artificially good, they don’t get that much more traffic than you and adultfyi.
Alexa is also good for initially validating claims, Kylie Ireland claims in the Public Service Ad that she did that she gets a half million views a month. Given her Alexa Rank there is no way that statement can possibly be true, or even anywhere near true.
When Cindi Loftus tries to sell her site, lukeisback.com, for 50K a look at her Alexa Rank says it probably isn’t worth that but it could be, that is when you ask to see the server logs, the ad revenue and any contractual commitments she has from advertisers.
Now let us take a look at www.gfy.com, with an Alexa Rank of 4,410. Does that sound too good to be true to you? It is and here is why. Alexa bases their rank largely on visits to a site by people who have Alexa installed on their browser, they figure that a certain percentage of all surfers have Alexa and from that they derive the rankings, if you don’t have the Alexa installed your visit doesn’t count much to Alexa. So what is gfy? it is an adult webmaster forum and almost all of the visitors are adult webmasters and they have Alexa installed on their browsers the result is they get a disproportionate amount of visitors that have Alexa.
It is relatively easy to make your Alexa Rank artificially good, I won’t tell how because that isn’t the point, What is not easy is making your rank artificially bad, as in the case of Ms Ireland, if she has half a million visitors a month there is no way she can make her Alexa Rank that bad.
All of of this taken into consideration you really do have very respectable traffic on mikesouth.com. Keep up the good work my friend.
7 Responses
A Reader Schools us On Alexa http://t.co/kbM0WWjjnz
J.r. Wolfe liked this on Facebook.
The reader seems to understand Alexa but clearly missed the boat on pageviews. I can completely buy the claim of Kylie Ireland who said she has “half million views a month.” Page views and unique visitors are not the same thing. Any real webmaster will tell you, they aren’t even close and Kylie Ireland didn’t claim to have half a million UNIQUE VISITORS, she claimed page views and inflation of page views is all the rage in mainstream.
Ever notice how when you visit a mainstream site they have these stories that get broken into 10 sections that force you to click through and look at every one? LIke the top 10 best looking porn stars. #10 – a page, then you click next and the next page loads to reveal #9. They could just freaking tell us in the one single page but no every damn time they have to have their countdown on 10 totally different pages. And they are doing that to artificially inflate their pageviews because that is what people sell ad rates based on – not actual unique visitors.
A unique visitor is one single person – and then a page view is how many pages a person may look at while at that site. So a single person could view 27 pages, while the next guy views 12 and the next 109. In the end that site now has 148 page views but still just 3 unique visitors. So there is absolutely no way in the world you could even guess what a sites page views may be based on their alexa rating – you could guesstimate unique visitors, sure but not page views because you just don’t have any way of knowing how many pages a single visitor to any given website may view and in the case like so many of those mainstream sites – a single visitor is tricked into viewing 10 at a time. So yeah, this person who helped you understand alexa really missed it big time on understanding traffic.
That would be incorrect actually. If kylie had anywhere near half a million views a month of any kind her alexa would be substantially better.there is no way on earth she gets that as the reader pointed out…unique or otherwise, alexa does take that into account.
I do love you guys, and I love this site as well… You missed the point that on the Alexa ranking there is a stat for page views per visit. would that not help the estimation? I am loving this discussion, if only for the fact that is it so hard to explain to a non webmaster how this all works. Why my site is better to throw a banner on than the next one… In time businesses with catch up with the future
This is a good site.
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