Alexa Experiment and Paid Posting

As my regular readers know, I am currently running public tests to see if rumored Alexa exploits work. Because Pay Per Post has discussed the issues surrounding my experiment twice, I want to also discuss my current view of Pay Per Post.

The short story is that, having given it some thought, I realized that I had to sever any relationship with paid-to-post programs if I wish to run the tests to gaming strategies. By my own request, I ceased to be a postie on Monday. But, that’s actually the small story, as it happens to have to do with me, personally.

The larger story has to do with Pay Per Post reaction: When they became aware of the experiment, Karen, of Customer Love, announced that Posties would not be permitted to participate in even short term tests to see if Alexa can be exploited. Later, “froogle” announced that PPP will be auto-detecting attempts to exploit Alexa using these redirects.

Karen and Froogle at Pay Per post are correct to announce this policy and check for compliance. (Checking is easy. I set this up so that participants cannot conceal participation.)

One reason given for PPP’s action appears to be this: PPP currently uses Alexa for segmentation. Therefor PPP cannot be permitting Posties to be exploiting Alexa to improve the price they charge advertisers.

As it happens, though I didn’t really think of this before launching the experiment, I recognize PPP’s policy as manifestly correct.

I suspect people will wonder why I didn’t think of this in the first place. Part of the reason is that, initially, I was focused only on testing the rumored exploit. I’m afraid, like the famous cat, I will someday be killed by my own curiosity.

Also, as it happens, I hadn’t taken a PPP opp in over 6 weeks or so and didn’t intend to take any if I actually managed to game my Alexa. So the thought “Oh, I’ll be able to take better opps” didn’t really hit me. (If it had, I would either have done the test secretly or resigned from PPP immediately. )

I also believe Alexa is inherently deficient due to the self-selection bias introduced by the toolbar and I believe it is already heavily gamed. So, I sincerely don’t believe a few blogs plublicly testing exploits makes much of a difference in overall accuracy or fairness of Alexa ranks.

Of course, the other reason I might have not thought of it is simply, ordinary stupidity and thoughtlessness.

Nevertheless, the fact is, PPP is correct: regardless of Alexa’s faults, because PPP uses Alexa for segmentation, Posties cannot be conducting of Alexa exploits on their blogs! (At minimum, the tests must be designed in ways that do not affect a PPP blogs’ Alexa rank in even the slightest. But that is difficult to know in advance.)

But I want to conduct tests and do so publicly. So here’s what I did.

Recognizing Pay Per Posts position is correct, I did two things rather quickly:
1) I yanked the redirect images from blog footers. Because of the experiments design, this immediately ended the first experiment which persisted only a few hours and so can have very little effect on anyone’s rank.¹

2) I voluntarily resigned from Pay Per Post.² I had to ask what the process was, and did a bit of fiddling at the PPP interface, but unfortunately, the process isn’t obvious. I sent pm’s to four PPP staff asking the procedure and also filled out a ticket. Within two hours of filling out the ticket, I was out of the system. I thanked Karen of Customer Love. (For those wondering about any financial consequences to me: there are none. I hadn’t taken a PPP opp in at least 6 weeks. )

3) I redesigned the experiment in a way that will actually give clearer results without the need of many blogs.¹

So, now I am free to conduct the current experiments and, what’s more important to me, I am free to conduct future experiments without violating PPP policies or exposing PPP or posties to any unfavorable publicity.

I also think Posties taking opps from Pay Per Post should applaud PPP for their quick response on this.

1. In fact, for those wondering, preliminary results suggest the short term test had absolutely zero effect. Because I was in the process of resigning, I kept images on my own blogs. The preliminary data suggest that this exploit does not work. LordMatt’s sudden increase in Alexa when he asked a few people to include images at his blog was probably due to a real increase in blog visitors with Alexa toolbars. Still, I need to continue 3-4 days to get incontrovertible evidence which I think is useful because rumored exploits are constantly popping up.

2. I also yanked my blogs from ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews. It is suprisignly difficult to automatically delete a blog from many of these services!
Tags:Alexa Rankings traffic

Related Posts:

• Alexa Network: Cooperative Exploit.
• Sky Rocket Alexa: Take Two!
• Big Bucks Blogger Alexa < 100,000
• PPP & Argus: Great Leap Forward

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