Oct
Gaming Alexa for profit
Text-link-ads (aff) seems to have been in the news again a bit of late, partly I’m sure because of the launch of their Feedvertiser product, as well as their fun blog-juice calculator.
One thing that has had me thinking a little but of late, as this blog has finally been listed in TLA’s database at the rate of $45 per link per month, is how they go about calculating the worth of a link.
There are only two factors listed on the TLA website for advertisers to use when assessing blogs, something called “link popularity” (which I assume is Google’s pagerank), and alexa ranking.
It seems the higher the pagerank and alexa ranking, the more TLA are asking for a link on your site (which makes sense). Now we can’t do much about our pagerank (in the short-term, at least), but can we do something about the alexa ranking?
Yes, yes we can.
Now I deliberated long and hard about posting this, it’s no great secret or anything, but it could affect my ability to sell text links here. I’ve decided to post it because the blog itself is more important to me than any links I might sell.
If you look over in the left hand sidebar of this blog, you will see that i use the most excellent WP-Useronline plugin. This plugin gives you a quick glance lowdown of who is online on your blog at any particular time. It’s always fun to watch the numbers spike just after a new entry is posted. Now wouldn’t we be better off having two or three spikes a day, than just one?
It would appear so. Although the alexa site states that:
Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once.
…this is irrelevant with blogs, as long as we send the visitor to a new page every time they come. Most of our readers come to our blog from an RSS feed, either in their own reader, or in an aggregator such as technorati, or a social bookmarking site like digg or reddit. The cool thing about RSS feeds is that they list an article, and send any clickers to the permalink for that article - bingo - a new page view every time as far as alexa is concerned!
So, how do we use this information to drive up our alexa ranking, and therefore our perceived value to advertisers?
Spread em baby!
A quick study of human behaviour - from studying my stats, a lot of bloggers will come to a permalink page via a feed, then if they want to hang around, they’ll go to the home page, and read the posts there. Now if we have, say, ten posts on the home page, and they’re posts in full, not summaries, the reader has no reason to leave the home page, as they can read ten full articles of yours from that page. Not much chop for our alexa ranking, is it? (more about this next post)
Let’s now say that you post three times a day to your blog, you’re going to want to spread the posts out over the day, to maximise the audience you’re exposing yourself to, but also to get as many visits to as many different permalinks as possible. By using WordPress’ “Post timestamp” feature, we can spread the posts over any timeframe we like. I tend to get up at around 3 to 4am, ply myself with caffeine and nicotine, and blog myself stupid until the rest of the family gets up around 6am (I have two young kids, sleepins are a thing of the past!). I’ll generally write three or four posts, and as of the last week or so, tell WordPress to post them at four or five hour intervals.
This seems to be working well, with my peak alexa ranking being around 13,000 this week, and todays at around 39,000. Time will tell if this theory holds water in the long term.
Check back in a couple of hours for my next post on whether we should use full articles or summaries in our home page, and more importantly, our RSS feeds.
13 comments so far
Where’s the profit? This theory assumes the higher the link price the higher the profit.
The opposite could occur also, less people buy links because it’s too expensive or they don’t think your site is worth it.
Alexa is stupid anyay:
45n5 has an alexa rank around 450,000 (I assume because you visit with your toolbar frequently) and gets 20 visits per day
My #1 trafficked site (averaging 720 visitors per day this week) has an alexa rank of 480,000
SERIOUSLY, Go figure.
I’ll spend my time working to get real visitors over gaming alexa rank for profit any day of the week.
You’re right, alexa is stupid, it can give you SOME idea of where you’re at, although a flakey one at best.
The point I was trying to make is that it CAN be gamed. For a company to be using that as its main determining factor of deciding link prices is just plain ludicrous!
You’re right about the price being too high - $45 for a one month link here, I guess the only way I can judge that is whether I would pay it, and I certainly wouldn’t! 
If, and it’s a big if, there are people out there prepared to pay the asking price, there’s no reason not to drive up the link prices LEGITIMATELY in this way.
One must ask why people like Darren at problogger and Lynn at Clicknewz.com do this very thing. I would guess that Darren at least is getting CPM ads, and there’s no doubt that by putting excerpts on his home page, he’s driving up impressions.
To prove the point that alexa can be gamed, got a domain that you want to try to get into the alexa movers and shakers? I don’t imagine that with a coordinated effort, it would be that hard.
BTW, I don’t use the alexa toolbar! 
Cheers mate
have you thought about adding an alexa button to every page on the blog too? You’re obviously aware that a visitor needs the alexa toolbar to make an impression with your rank, but if you want to boost your rank higher get a button too (plus you can link it to your amazon associates id too!).
I recently tried using a future post timestamp and it just went ahead and published it anyway!
It seems, I neglected to check the Edit timestamp box. D’oh!
Sarah, I’ve taken your suggestion and placed the button down there at the bottom right, where I think it will load after the content. I’ll be keeping a close eye on page load times though, as I’m very wary of losing readers because the page loads too slowly due to all the little widgets.
Will - PMSL! - only because I’ve done the very same thing on more than one occasion!
Considering how easy and unambiguous the majority of WordPress is, they should make this necessity a little clearer or remove it. If I want to post in the future surely all I should need to do is set a future timestamp?
Thanks for Alexa button tip, Sarah!
No doubt it can be gamed, I’ve even seen scipts for gaming it before.
Knowing how crappy it is, my point was it’s a waste of time and energy to think twice about it.
Imroving you’re impressions could be interesting, but only to game alexa? lol.
Cheers Mate
Yes, Alexa can be gamed easily - and it also depend on the viewer category. As the text link ads may be of relevance only on a short term basis, I feel we should strive more to increase our page strength (a new metric promoted by SEOmoz.org). And instead of putting someone else’s ads on your site, you can promote your own affiliate minisites matching the theme of your site. It is my experience that such a strategy generates more revenue and also does not irritate the viewers.
Will - you’re right, I was thinking the same thing, why have a dialogue to set it all up if it working is contingent on you clicking a checkbox?
Mark, I guess I was talking about it a bit backwards - We all want more page impressions, gaming alexa to game TLA is but one benefit of an increase. CPM ads is another, more AdSense clicks is another, more people seeing your affiliate links is another(althoug none of these are guaranteed from more PV’s)…..the list goes on………
GS - I love that pagestrength thing, I’ve used it at
[...] payperpost.blogwh~ (8) « Gaming Alexa for profit When did I become a yank? » [...]
[...] Well, there are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa rankings seriously. Stuart at PimpMyPageRank recently posted that if you want to sell ad space of your website through services like Text-Link-Ads, you need a better Alexa Ranking and Google PR. There are many online shoppers who are still very skeptical of where they’re going to shop on the internet. So they usually follow the others and use ratings like Alexa, Google pagerank or other traffic rankers to perceive the value of your site. [...]
[...] I wrote some time about gaming alexa for profit, but I must say I only scratched the surface, talking about using legitimate methods to increase the number of page views for your blog. [...]
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