NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

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Weird Alexa Rankings

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Do you ever use Alexa to quickly judge a website’s traffic?  I do…all the time.

On Google Chrome tab I use an SEO extension that quickly grabs all sorts of info on a website, including Alexa traffic rankings:

In case you don’t know:
The lower the number, the higher your traffic (kind of like golf).

Google is the #1 most visited site in the world, so its Alexa rank is 1.  Got it?  Good…

NevBlog is currently ranked: 170,476 (at one point I was #75,000)!
…and my business HouseOfRave is ranked: 492,856

The funny thing is, House Of Rave gets a lot more visits per day than NevBlog (it used to be the reverse a few years ago).

So here is a monthly Google Analytics snapshot of NevBlog traffic (keep in mind the number is usually higher as I don’t have Google Analytics installed on all my visitor pages):

Here is a monthly Google Analytics snapshot of House Of Rave:

You’ll notice that House of Rave gets something like TWICE the traffic NevBlog gets every day, yet NevBlog’s Alexa rank is nearly THREE times lower!  Whhaaa!?

Theoretically the Alexa rankings should be switched, but they’re not. It’s not hard to figure out why:

NevBlog draws a lot more people who might be web designers or tech people….this means they’ll be more likely to have the Alexa Toolbar installed (or some variation of it), which is how Alexa gets their rankings.  I’m also presuming the larger the site, the better stat accuracy you’ll get.  Compete.com seems to have a more accurate view:

They got the traffic wrong (although they can’t ever TRULY know without you telling them), but they got the comparison estimates pretty close.

For January 2010, Compete.com says:

  • NevBlog got 10,386 visits
  • House Of Rave got 15,202 visits

In reality, according to Google Analytics:

  • NevBlog got 14,259 visits
  • HouseOfRave 34,970 visits

    It seems the webmaster tool bar effect also applies to Compete.com…but their results seem far more accurate.

    I’m curious, do your website and Alexa/Compete rankings add up??

    HOLY FREAKIN CRAP What Happened??

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    Don’t worry, I’m just migrating from Blogger to WordPress, so this weekend you most likely will see a bunch of wonky formatting, dead links and other weird things going down on NevBlog.

    Cheers :-)
    -Nev

    Signup Confirmed!

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    You have been added to the NevBlog.com email list!

    WHAT YOU DO NOW…..

    1.) Check your email inbox for the first welcome letter (with the password inside).  Make sure it didn’t go into your spam folder.

    2.) THAT’S IT!

    There’s absolutely no spam we send and you can unsubscribe anytime.  You can always respond to the email and they go directly to my personal inbox.

    Thanks for joining!
    -Neville

    Start the day

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    My favorite way to start the day: coconut and freshly juiced apples w/
    ginger!

    Micro Wha??

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    Hahaha… I never noticed that where I sit in the library to read
    magazines are two "state of the art" microfiche machines!

    I wonder if anyone still uses them…

    Thanks for buying the copywriting!

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    Sweet!  You just bought a one-time offer for my copywriting for crazy cheap.

    Remember:  I didn’t want your money for this…I want your DATA!

    SO THE NEXT STEPS FOR YOU:

    1.) Email me anything you can about your offer.  Generally just showing me what you already have will give me more than enough ideas.

    2.) Email me any other pieces of info you think will help (optional).

    3.) Include your phone number where I can reach you (in case I want to pick your brain for ideas).

    4.) email me at NevMed@gmail.com with the above info.

    I’ll take these 10 pieces of copy I have to do in “first come, first serve” order…so it should be roughly a max of three days to get it back to you.

    After that, test out my page and let me know the results!

    Thanks again for taking part in this….please email or call if you have questions or problems:

    Neville Medhora
    NevBlog.com
    nevmed@gmail.com
    713.301.1546

    Burj Al Arab Plans Dashed

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    I wrote this post about Dubai a long time ago and how I wanted to stay at the Burj Al Arab (Considered the best hotel in the world) for a night.

    Every room is at least a 2-storey suite, and the smallest room is roughly 1,800 sq. ft.. I priced it out and found it would be between $2,000 and $2,200 per night (depending on currency fluctuations).

    Well I’m officially spending New Year’s 2009-2010 in Dubai this year, so I thought whilst there I would snag a suite at the Burj Al Arab for the night and have a big party with my friends and then everyone could stay over.

    I called around, and the problem is I can’t have that many guests (pretty much no guests at all)….especially to stay over. So what’s the point in getting a big room like that without the fun of throwing a big party in it? Basically it’d be me sitting in a big room….no fun.

    So I think the limited guests policy they have officially nixed my plans to stay there. A little more poking around and I was told NOT to stay there. The reason I was told it’s rated the best hotel is each room is large, nice and has expensive gold finishes, art work etc….basically crap I don’t care about. The hotel I’ve been told is actually very quiet, boring and a little stuffy….it’d be great to stay at some point, but it’s definitely not a party spot nor guest friendly…deal breaker.

    Friends in Dubai recommended I have breakfast or dinner there to get a taste of it, but staying might be a little much.

    Still curious to see the rooms, a quick YouTube search showed several guest tours of various suites:

    Who needs to travel, we have YouTube!

    Adam McFarland

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    Kind enough to put me on his list of people he reads, I’d like to post the list of blogs I regularly read:

    His is seriously the only blog I regularly read anymore.

    I admire and relate to Adam because I think he’s in a very similar industry (ecommerce) and age bracket as me. I view him with a tint of envy and admiration because of two main things:

    1. He seems to have a really solid team: The company Pure Adapt has four members which each bring their own unique talents to the table. I’m not sure if I’d like that arrangement just yet, because owning a company 100% is sometimes better than 25%. However with a solid team I have no doubt these guys can build something HUGE…..and owning 25% of something HUGE isn’t a bad gig.

    2. Programming and Engineering Background: If I had to do it all over again I would’ve rather had an engineering or computer science background in college like Adam (come to think of it I did…but I was at the bottom of all my computer science classes and got kicked out of the program). Adam’s advanced understanding of programming allowed him to build his own custom ecommerce system which I find incredibly impressive….and do all sorts of unique and highly effective promotions like Detailed Image’s auto-ads and auto-site-specials.

    Me reading Adam’s site:


    (Forgive the old photo and bad Photoshop job)

    Ok, enough brown-nosing….go read Adam’s Blog!