Two bloggers from Stand Firm in Faith have commented on the numbers provided by Alexa Internet. You can find the comments under the post Some Blog Rankings. As Robert Turner of Virtue OnLine points out the numbers from Alexa agree with the data given by Google. I have posted a comment under the post Some Blog Rankings from Alexa that gives their explanation of how they do their rankings. In this space I'd like to do my best to explain how Alexa arrives at their blog rankings.
Alexa uses three measures. One is reach. Alexa defines this as "Percent of global Internet users who visit this site." For example, I am told that VirtueOnline has readers from 180 countries. That would likely kick up the VOL reach.
The second measure is traffic. Alexa defines traffic as "a combined measure of page views and users (reach)." So, if one site has 20 users who are on constantly, going to lots of pages and another site has 40 users who go to fewer pages, then the traffic measure of the two sites will depend on how the two variables (page views and users) combine.
The third measure is page views per user. Alexa defines this as "The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site."
Given that all three measures are important it doesn't make sense to focus on one measure and say that Alexa is wrong because that one measure is higher for one blog while the other two measures are ignored.
2 comments:
Tony+,
This is, again, all very interesting. And Alexa is of course free to rank websites according to their own criteria.
The implication, however, that SR gets more traffic is insupportable given an actual comparison between the actual numbers of both sites which demonstrate that SF gets about 30 times traffic.
So, if you like Alexa, use their ranking system and have a great time, but just be aware that the actual numbers demonstrate that their ranking system is not a good measure of how well a site is trafficked.
As for google, Google ranks sites according to a site's own embedded site meter. SF, however, is not optimized for search engine compatability, meaning that any analysis of our traffic based on what is found in various search engines, is immediately suspect.
But again, if it makes you happy, then have a great time using Alexa and Google ranking.
I prefer to compare actual numbers.
It would be quite interesting, I think, to compare numbers between SF and DV.
Matt
As I thought was clear from what I had written about Alexa, this service uses a number of different measures. If the SFIF crowd would like to stand on one criteria alone, that is your perogative. As I explained, Alexa measures a number of criteria and forms their rankings based on the total of those different criteria.
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