Online Media Cultist

What’s up with Alexa ranking spikes?

If you’re into the web and a stats junkie, that probably means that you’re over at Alexa at least several times a day checking out ranking trends. Everyone knows that Alexa rankings (which are based on sort of a Nielsen-like system of extrapolating overall rankings based on the web activities of those browsers which have the Alexa toolbar installed) need to be taken with big heaping grains of salt. And everyone loves to quote Alexa stats and talk endlessly about them anyway (including me)!

Now, I’ve noticed that many sites over the last few days have seen a spike in ranking. Has anyone else noticed this? I did a quick search on Google News and Technorati and saw no reporting about it.

My guess is that some large scale algorithmic adjustment has taken place. That, or a bunch of sites have seen their relative rank increase sharply all within a short period of time, but the former theory makes more sense to me.

Consider:

CNN

Fark

Mahalo

TechCrunch

Techmeme

I pulled the above sites from the top of my head (what that says about me, I’m not sure!).

By the way, here’s an article with a ton of tips on how to increase your site’s Alexa ranking.

I’m a sucker for lists. Come on admit it, you are too!

So of course while I was messing around with Alexa today I had to check out the top websites in the United States, at least according to Alexa (which should be taken with the same grain of salt as any other web tracking service).

Amongst the Top 100, there’s plenty not to be surprised at. Google is #1, MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook run 3-4-5 (with our dear friend Yahoo hanging in at #2), and so on.

Craigslist is #10, which some may be a little surprised at. IMDB is a striking standout at #17. Digg is in front of the New York Times (#27 and #29, respectively)!

Head further down the list (watch out for the porn!) and you find some interesting nuggets. Friendster, often thought of as an also ran in the U.S., is hanging in at #71. Music service Imeem is #62, and I’m willing to guess it was nowhere near the top 100 a year ago.

And at #91, we have FanFiction.net (think: Harry Potter maniacs creating teeming new novels about the world of Hogwarts).

You have to love the interwebs.

Don’t get me wrong, I really dig MyBlogLog, the simple and stripped down social networking tool for bloggers with the killer app widget that lets you see and interact with the readers who visit your site.

But I’m wondering if the buzz is wearing off. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the activity level on the site has subsided considerably since the admittedly recent days when blogger-fueled hype was high and the announcement of MBL’s acquisition by Yahoo! was making the rounds.

Certainly for several months it seemed as though there was a lot of activity on the site itself. I received friend requests frequently for example (see my profile here without doing much to earn the honor, and it was easy to tell just by clicking around that many people were discovering and making use of the site’s features. I’m not getting that sense of late. My activity level on the site is about the same, but the number of friend requests and messages has dropped considerably.

Perhaps even more telling is that I haven’t read anything about MyBlogLog in a while (this Technorati chart is a bit inconclusive, I must admit). Could it be that the early adopter crowd has incorporated MBL into ho hum everyday online life and moved on? I’m guilty myself, having caught the Twitter wave and am very much fixating on that particular e-vortex as the latest-greatest thing.

While Alexa rankings must be taken with a grain of salt, it shows that MBL traffic has leveled off. It’s still ahead of Twitter, though it’s close now!

I still appreciate and love MyBlogLog’s best feature: I get to see the faces (or avatars, or artistic representations) of some of the people who stop by my site.

I’d love to see what other people think: what’s the deal with MyBlogLog these days?

Feedburner has launched a new service that tracks both site traffic and RSS subscribers in one place. While many publishers use one service (such as Site Meter) to track on-site page views and another to track RSS subscribers, this is the first time a comprehensive service has been offered that allows publishers to get a bird’s eye view of all site visitors in one place.

Publishing 2.0 is forward-looking enough to posit a future where we can finally drop the vocabulary that often confuses conversations about how “popular” a site is and move to “a new metric called ‘content views,’ which is agnostic to where or how content is viewed.”

Achieving a standard definition of measuring how many people view a website would have profound repercussions for online media companies. Conversations between publishers and advertisers would be vastly simplified, for one. A new wave of services that rank sites according to content views could also then potentially emerge to compete with and perhaps surpass the likes of Alexa’s traffic rankings.

While most people seem to respect Alexa’s rankings, no one really likes them or agrees that they’re anywhere near accurate. This uncertainty can affect things such as site valuation, funding, business development deals, advertising, and so on. A quick Google News search brought up this anguished plea: “Alexa.com’s indexing of website popularity is fatally flawed. All you need to do to verify this is compare your own internal website analytics with the tracking provided by Alexa.”

A common definition of site traffic coupled with a standard way to measure all of the ways that people view Internet content – and Feedburner is in the best position to do this for the time being – may open the door to a better way to rank Internet traffic.