PageRank Drops + Alexa = Lower Income
Wed, 9 May, 2007 – 7:50 am
There's been a recent PR update (for the one or two who maybe didn't notice!). The PR seems to have dropped on a few of my own sites plus a few sites I read. I have to say that I've not seen a change this big for a long long time. As we know, when it comes to rankings etc. PR isn't important. But of course it's important when it comes to selling advertising via somewhere like Text Link Ads, or perhaps if you sell advertising space privately. Alexa is another factor which is taken into account. But neither of these should!!nnStu's recent post (Are you a comment snob) got me thinking about this. As he mentioned at first he was taking the PR, Alexa and the feedreader stats into account as to whether a blog was worthy of reading. A lot of people probably do, but as we're all aware (and as he admitted), these stats are so wrong to taken into account.nnWhy? Here are some figures from a few sites of mine:nn
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- Site 1
- PR 4 (was 5)
- Alexa 190,000 (ish)
- Visitors – 100 estimated per day, although 200-300 spam bots a day!
- TLA worth – $43*
- Site 2
- PR 2 (was 4)
- Alexa 1,500,000 (ish)
- Visitors – 650 average a day
- TLA worth – $6*
- Client's site
- PR 4 (was 5)
- Alexa 63,000 (ish)
- Visitors – 5000 average a day
- TLA worth – $54*
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nnSo as you can see, the Text Link Ad worthiness* is offering a 650 daily visitor site link for $6, a 100 visits a day site link for $43 and a 5000 visitors a day link for $54! Clearly these prices are skewed by the PR and Alexa. I can understand taking the PR into account as some advertisers just want to pay for the PR received from the link on your site, but for visitors should Alexa really be considered? Take site 2, an Alexa of 1.5 million, yet has 6.5 times more visitors a day than site 1 with an Alexa of 190,000. I know personally I'd rather get a link on site 2 for just $6 a month!nnI personally think Text Link Ads needs a better system for measuring visitor numbers. You have to install their code onto your site to display their links, surely it wouldn't be hard to set up a simple visitor count with this. Perhaps people who have a low PR site (I don't think PR3 or below gets accepted) could still get 'in' if they can prove they have a good visitor count. Afterall, at this point site 2 wouldn't be accepted despite receiving a lot more traffic than site 1.nn* all links were checked on the public calculator with the same factors besides changing the domain.
I alluded exactly the same here. My PR1 (therefore no good for TLA), gets _loads_ more vistors, consequently more clicks and more earnings. Shouldn't this be more valuable to an advertiser?nnYou have a great point about TLA being able to count traffic really easily – they could even do a "pre-authorisation" where you install a widget on your site/blog for a month, so that they can determine traffic levels…before allowing you to sign up the site/blog proper.
By Burty on Wed, 9 May, 2007
Burt I totally agree. PR is a bad measurement and Alexa is even worse. Site 2 I mentioned received 850 visitors on Monday! I even noticed two client sites that aren't even live yet have better Alexa ranking than Site 2. The only people visiting these is me (the only Alexa I have is in a Firefox extension) and perhaps the client.nnDefinitely a stats widget would give a much better and accurate result and therefore give Advertisers a better service at the right cost.
By Sarah on Wed, 9 May, 2007
Alexa is worst than PR. For one site of mine that has 700 visitors a day have alexa rank of 800K , and for other website having only 50-100 visitors a day have Alexa rank of 200K, does it make sense ?ncompete.com seems to be more accurate for US traffic.
By TechDuke on Wed, 9 May, 2007
Hi Sarah, seem to be getting some WP database problems here, a lot of your sidebar stuff seems not to be working
By Stu on Thu, 10 May, 2007
Techduke – Alexa just doesn't make sense half the time! I'll check out compete.com, never heard of it before
nnStu – it's a WP issue to do with temp file space or something. Been happening all week and then it rectifies itself. It's a server wide thing and even WP aren't sure what the reasoning is behind it. Still, am moving this domain to another server anyhow as I've been intending to for months, hopefully that'll stop it (for a while at least).
By Sarah on Thu, 10 May, 2007
Just to update, last week seemed to be even better for Site 2. With an Alexa rank of 1.5 million, it had an average of 800 ish visitors per day, with one day topping 900 visitors.nnGotta say, the Alexa rank is absolutely ridiculous on this site!!!nnDo you think it's just all made up? Because I'm beginning to think that!
By Sarah on Sun, 13 May, 2007