For some mysterious reason, Alexa seems to be popular. But it’s abysmally inaccurate!

I know this from my own stats, and from a sort of “test” I did with another blogger.

BigBucksBlogger now has an Alexa rank of 241,029 averaged over the last three months. I’m now getting about 21 visitors a day, but I was getting zero during part of that time because the blog didn’t even exist!

In contrast, The Knitting Fiend was ranked very near 500,000 back in March when I was getting over 8000 unique visits a day to the blog!

Worse, WendyKnits which gets thirty times the traffic of The Knitting Fiend is ranked lower than The Knitting Fiend.

Advertiser’s may pay attention to Alexa. But if they take these ranks as describing the amount of traffic, they are seriously deceiving themselves. (I’m going to have to write a blog post and show the values. I find it hilareous.)

Why?

All of these companies have an interest in creating algorhythms that “diss” sites accustomed to being high ranking in their competitor’s algorhythms. The result is that, in order to get one’s site on, say, Alexa, one has to start using the Alexa toolbar. Voila – new authority for Alexa.

I believe one of your earlier commenters, Andy, pointed out the same thing with Qualcast.

After four years of doing this, I’ve simply decided to ignore all of the ranking systems that don’t directly impact my ability to earn money with sponsored entries. Which is not to say that I only post sponsored stuff now: I only post about 1 sponsored entry for every 4 or so posts now. But I do post at least a dozen entries a day.

That, I’ve found, tends to be what really separates the A-list bloggers: frequency.

I’ll check the knitting blog link. I’m getting the same 403– and the url is ok. That’s very odd!

=== Update: The problem appears to be at the level of my host. It is also preventing me from accessing FTP. Sorry!

I do agree, and was agreeing with the same with Kat (another well known postie).

I have niche blogs that get more traffic, but certainly don’t generate as many links.

Work on ways to make your stats as public as possible, work on building up your subscribers.

One other thing, so some reason when I click a link to your knitting blog from here, I get a 403 error. When I click through from the homepage of the domain, it works fine.

Still, you have to admit two things:
1) few consider “knitting” a high traffic niche particularly compared to “tech blogs”
and
2) when people are discussing things like whether or not PPP will succeed, they do like to suggest all those blogs are low traffic. Based on… what exactly?

The Knitting Fiend is in the PayPerPost program. It seems to have traffic. Presumably, for the right business person, the demographics would be good, and a venue like PPP would profit by linking up niche blogs and advertisers.

So, it is sort of worth comparing traffic!

Also significant, if you don’t install the Quantcast tracking code, the figures are useless.

If you do have it, it is not too far off Google Analytics and other tracking scripts, thus it has the potential, but as people don’t use it, it is almost worthless.

p.s. I would read through, because you got names muddled in a few places