It seems to me that many sites have recently showed a slight drop in Alexa rank lately. Facebook as mentioned in my last post has slowed down slightly and I have noticed this on many other big sites. Is Alexa tweaking the way it analyses statistics? I’m losing interest in Alexa rankings to be honest, but this is something I will keep an eye on.

Facebook fascinates me, not because of the countless annoying messages I get on it about quizzes and vampire fights, but because of its exponential growth. This exponential growth pattern occurs because the more members it has, the more people are referred, and the cycle continues. However I believe this may be about to change.

Having signed up myself a few months ago, I am now totally bored with the site. I’m not the only one either, many people I have spoken to have said the same thing. Facebook was very fun at first but is now a bit tedious.

There is a possible downturn in traffic too. Please see below.

It is widely known that Alexa is not very accurate at measuring the traffic levels for smaller sites, but for one of the major contenders such as Facebook, we can assume these statics are fairly reflective of the overall traffic trends.

It could be a seasonal trend, maybe every December sites such as Facebook received lower traffic, possibly because people are preparing for Christmas, who knows. It is interesting to note that MySpace.com does not have the same downturn. Personally I think Facebook could be in trouble.

What is it? Well apparently search engine companies are focusing more on trust these days than on other quantifying methods such as page rank (PR). Will we one day have a little green Trust Rank bar on our browsers telling us how much people trust a certain website? I hope not, as just with Google Page Rank there are clever seo people who know how to manipulate such figures. Also how do we vote a confidence or trust on a website? Surely people are going to down vote their competitors

I don’t know too much about all this TR stuff, I don’t know if anyone does. But if you do, I would like to hear your views on this issue.

The posts I am refereeing to are here and here

The Alexa rank of this site keeps climbing. I am pretty sure its because of blog items like this that are keworded to specifically bring in people that are interested in the Alexa rank, and are likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, which in turn will increase the rank even further.

Although having a rank number associated with a site may see purely academic and of no real importance, some people do measure a sites worth based on this rank. Wikipedia is a classic example. If you try to put your own site onto Wikipedia, one of the factors people use to decide if your site is notable is to look at your Alexa rank.

Recently, one of my blogs inspired another web master who has in turn written about his experience of the Alexa rank and he has linked directly to my site. The very fact that he linked to me made me view his website and go through some pages with the Alexa tool bar turned on. This will have affected his Alexa rank. After writing this, I am going to head over there again and check out what else he has to say, hopefully he will do the same, and we will probably share some of the collective traffic targeted to finding more about Alexa.

To view the blog post I am talking about, click here

This is a follow up to this post.

Recently the Alexa page rank of this site has climbed significantly. It’s still not in the top 100,000 but it’s a marked improvement. I put it down to the simple fact that people are searching for keywords relating to Alexa Page Rank and these people are more likely to have to tool installed as a method of increasing their own rank. In fact, by writing this it is likely that the page rank will increase further, which reiterates my point that Alexa Page Rank can be cheated.

This is a tricky one and something I have been thinking about for quite some time. Having a high Alexa or Google rank can be a way of trying to quantify a web sites value, which is especially important if you are going to sell it or intend to sell advertising. The problem I have with it is that Alexa and Google rankings can be cheated.

I will give you an example how people do this. Supposing you and ten of your mates all have websites that you visit every day. You could do a deal that you promise to visit each others sites daily with the Alexa toolbar installed. The tool bar will report back to Alexa that there have been more visitors lately and your rank will go up. Because only a small percentage of people actually have to toolbar installed, Alexa have to base the figures that they present based on projections. For example, if only 1% of people use the Alexa toolbar, their final projections must be multiplied by 100. Its quite easy to see how just a few people can make a massive difference to a small websites results. There are even websites popping up now that automate this system for you. You install a bit of software which makes your site visit everyone else’s. In return, you and everyone gets a higher rank, and the software owners siphon off some of the visitors which they then sell for advertising.

Another thing to consider is that site demographics will also affect results. Visitors to websites about Alexa and Google rankings are more likely to be interested in such things and are therefore much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed on their system.

The same is true with Google, but I think things are a little more complex. The Google Page Rank system is based on inbound links which count as a vote in favour of a particular website. If you are lucky enough to already own a few high ranking websites it’s pretty easy to artificially boost a ranking on new site. You could in fact set up a website that has no value at all, and link a dozen or so very highly ranked sites to it which would result in another highly ranked site.

I believe most of these problems get ironed out when a site is truly massive. The top 100 websites in the Alexa rankings are all deservedly placed.

I think the truth of the matter is that it’s almost impossible to quantify a website’s “worth” using mathematics alone. Algorithms employed by the best search engines are extremely advanced but they are no where near perfect.