oliver2002

Shame on you not being based in the land of the free

HikerT

I'm not sure what you are saying. I was the one saying traffic rankings >100K aren't credible. Throwing your non-credible 150K site in the mix only validates what I was saying. The inflated ranking for your site make sense because your activity is accounting for 1/10 of the data that determines your ranking. The relative alexa ranking for my site and Raffles site also makes sense. Maybe a little bolding will help with the myopia:

http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more

Raffles

Hey, no guns, decent trains, proper food shops, free health system, longer life expectancy than US, I can buy 10 different daily newspapers every day, governing system with the ability to actually pass legislation, airlines who don't fill all their business and First Class seats with upgrades .... I'll survive!

brooklynmatt

I think you missed the point, I'm sharing all the data with you to help you understand.

It's not >100k that is the point you describe, the change occurs at ~100k and I've proof of my hitting that change by the fact that I am now being charted- those sites not at that level will not be charted.

Now, the data I provided you was that I'm getting 7-8k uniques and ~15k Pvs per month.

Further data is that 1 unique is checking mail. 16-20 Pvs per month. That is not 10% of traffic, that is an insignificant number.

Alexa is NOT based on pageviews it is based on pageviews from people who have installed the Alexa toolbar- which is primarily other bloggers. So since a lot of other bloggers read my site my score is lower.

I'll confident be at 100k in 4-6 weeks, and I'm sure I still won't have as many page views and uniques as Raffles here.

Trying to share data here to increase understanding.

gpapadop

the more I read the more I get confused. It happens a lot with me

HikerT

Good grief. Re-read post 170. I sad it was around ~100K.

Are you just playing dumb here or do you really not get it? A few days ago Alexa indicated 10% (9.1% to be exact) of your visitors went to mail.saverocity.com. How many uniques was your alexa ranking was based on? Can you do the math? It's not that hard, but let me help. 1/11 = 9.1%. In other words, 11 Alexa users determined your ranking, one of which was you. You are clearly distorting your own ranking, intentionally or not, and it is quite significant. This link that I posted a few posts back has a pretty good explanation of what is going on. Did you bother to read it?

http://www.sitesell.com/alexa.html

They actually discuss an example almost identical to your site, with a 150K ranking based on 20 Alexa uniques. This kind of "scatter" has NOTHING to do with the <~100K sites we were discussing, but go ahead and continue to knock down the strawman you set up. Note that link does not reach your conclusion, instead they conclude this:

brooklynmatt

Actually I hadn't bothered to read it, and now I do I realize its just as useless as I thought previously.

I see you are quite detiremined to stick to your beliefs on Alexa and who am I to try to change that. I did try to share my data to help you see that, but it seems you are happy with your position, so ill leave you to it. FYI your 'help' with the maths above was wrong also since your assumption that I have 11 Alexa readers is wrong too.

Cheers.

HikerT

If you want to focus on the numbers, you sure have a funny way of wanting to ignore the data. How do you explain the Alexa statistic that ~10% of your visitors go to mail.saverocity.com? Similarly, you seemed baffled that my site would have a higher Alexa ranking than raffles comparing uniques. This even after I explained in advance that a forum site like mine would benefit from more page views due to the nature of a forum site. A typical blog gets ~2 page views per day from a daily visitor, whereas a forum site will have many more. We can see this by looking at Alexa data. My site shows ~8 per day. FT shows ~4 per day. Raffles, FTG, MMS, TGP all show ~2 per day. But curiously enough you site shows ~12 per day. But go ahead and continue to believe you are not doing anything to distort your ranking six fold.

gpapadop

the more you two debate the more confused I get

HikerT

It's very simple, Matt just needs to disable his Aleaxa toolbar or stop visiting his site a hundred times per day.

brooklynmatt

Because 10% of my visitors don't go to mail.saverocity.com - its an incorrect number. No different from the 'average visitor visits 12.6 pages per day' which is also incorrect.

My point is that I am not distorting my numbers, the numbers are just not sound.

You see, you are getting your 'data' from Alexa, where as I am taking that Alexa data and comparing it with data from more reliable sources to show its disproportionately wrong.

You claim (based upon my Alexa numbers...) that I have 11 Alexa visitors to my site, and that alone means I get a score of 150K right now - but if that is the case why hasn't George got a score even lower than me, because he gets comments from dozens of bloggers (who use Alexa)

So if he has say 25 Alexa users and I have 11 shouldn't he be higher ranked?

Although in fairness I know that I don't have 11 Alexa users visiting my site, I know that the number is very different from that, but that wouldn't gel with your interpretation of what is accurate data.

Your argument has been throughout that your numbers aren't sound (because they are outside of the magic number where Alexa starts becoming accurate) I'm saying my numbers aren't accurate either, but I think that they are within the magic number of where they should be accurate.

So who has accurate numbers from Alexa?

ma91pmh

Next person to mention Alexa has to sit in the Naughty Spot for the rest of the afternoon

HikerT

Matt, I'm not disputing your webmaster stats. Those should be accurate as there is no sampling error. I'm just trying to have an intellectually honest discussion about why Alexa isn't sampling your site very well. In order to do that we need to look at the Alexa stats to make sense of it. I'd say it's likely due to a very low number of Alexa visitors, with one of them heavily distorting the ranking with excessive page views. I suppose it could be something else but you can't ignore obvious red flags like ~10% of Alexa users visiting a mail subdomain (really you aren't that naive are you to not understand what this implies?) or page views per user that are 600% the norm for a blog. Just humor us and disable your alexa toolbar and let us know what happens over the next 3 months.

hotelmotel

^

brooklynmatt

I've been talking about how many times I visit mail thoroughly this intellectual discussion 16-20 per month. If that equals 10% of all visits to the site that would mean I only received 200 visits per month at most from people with the toolbar, anymore and the 'accurate' mail. Statistic would be different right?

Anyways, no, if the reason is that my toolbar is dropping my score ill leave it right where it is and see where it goes, it will be interesting to see if having a lower score has any benefits, so ill examine those instead. I would recommend that you chose another metric when comparing how competitor sites perform but you do what you want.

And lets move on, I don't see the point in continuing to argue this when its clear our positions aren't moving anywhere.