NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Alexa

Blogger to WordPress Alexa Effect

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I figured transitioning from Blogger to WordPress on March 1st would have a significant effect on my traffic and Alexa rank, but it actually went pretty well!

A ton of old posts are still mis-directed to wrong URL’s which just go to my 404 error page, however it seemed traffic quickly recovered in a few days:

I really hate the Google Analytics versions of my NevBlog stats because I have many pages and files that ARE NOT setup with the tracking code….also visitors to my XML feed don’t get counted, and those are a pretty significant chunk of traffic.

The actual server stats look more like this:

ahhh….that’s more like it!

Here were some basic stats right before the switch:

Stats on 3-1-2010:
NevBlog Alexa: 173,357
Yahoo Pages Indexed: 761
Bing Pages Indexed: 3,170
Google Pages Indexed: 670

Stats on 5-11-2010 (today):
NevBlog Alexa: 148,440
Yahoo Pages Indexed: 1,204
Bing Pages Indexed: 511
Google Pages Indexed: 890

So it seems I actually went up in Alexa ranking (although that’s probably due to writing more often) and it’s EASIER for search engines to find me with WordPress.  I think what really helped with Google (my main source of traffic) was a great WordPress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator which let Google automatically know where all my pages were.  Anyone with a WordPress blog needs that plugin.

Well, I’m off!
-Neville (The guy with a bunch of readers everyday)

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??