Advertising Networks - Stop basing our Advertising Rates on Alexa

Im becoming more and more alarmed with the number of advertising networks who are using Alexa to base advertising rates for publishers. For example, Text Link Ads and ReviewMe.

As you know, i have never had any faith in Alexa. The top results are pretty accurate (Alexa claim 100,000) however outside that range figures are very inaccurate and can easily be manipulated by website owners to boost their own rankings. The irony is that its the websites outside the ‘accurate range’ who are being hit the hardest as a higher percentage of their sites income is based on the advertising networks i mentioned above.

How can Alexa rankings be manipulated

There are a number of ways to increase the alexa rank of the blog or website you run.

• The most common method is to download the Alexa Toolbar, set your site as the homepage and watch the page impressions increase every time you use your browser (usually IE but they recently added firefox). Clearly, there is only so much inflating that someone can do using this method.
• Many blogs are raving about how adding the Alexa Stats Widget box to the side of their blog is increasing their Alexa ranking by a significant amount. Yaro from Entrpreneurs Journey recently coved this in his post ‘How To Boost Your Alexa Ranking In One Easy Step‘.
• The third most common method is by using a redirect. Instead of the blogger using www.yourblog.com to link to their site they use http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.yourblog.com. The blogger would simply add that link to their comments and signatures in forums etc. I’ve noticed that this redirect is being used by a considerable number of members on MyBlogLog.
• One other way to increase your ranking (and one i heard someone recommending on a forum) is to buy thousands of impressions on a really cheap and low quality banner exchange or ad network. The kind who will display your site on completely unrelated sites using pop ups, pop unders and whatnot.

There are some other methods as well. Ive seen some scripts for sale that promise to inflate your ranking however i havent tested them.

From the Horses Mouth

There is a fantastic article by Loren Baker on Search Engine Journal called ‘Alexa Bias Exposed by Top Google Engineers‘. I strongly recommend reading it

This is what Alexa said about its rankings

…the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa’s data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

I found Loren Baker’s article on a post Chris Stark wrote last month entitled ‘Alexa bias and the need for alternatives‘. Chris commented that its a shame that Text Link Ads use Alexa as a criteria (I agree 100%). Neil Patel of Text Link Ads replied to his statement with the following :

Chris, we at Text Link Ads also feel that Alexa is not too reliable, but there are not too many other services that provide this kind of information. For this reason we feel that using multiple sources will help paint a more accurate picture of a website.

Let’s take a moment to look at the quotes i have mentioned. First off, lets look at Alexa’s statement. They said quite clearly that ‘Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable’. My poker forum community is a PR 5 and as of 28th April it has had more than 420,000 page impressions and around 50,000 unique visitors. So i think it would be safe to say that the majority of websites which are in the top 100,000 for Alexa have a page rank of 5 and above.

Now lets go back to what Neil Patel of Text Link Ads said. He said that they know Alexa is unreliable yet there are not too many other services that provide this kind of information.

The vast majority of publishers on TLA have a page rank of 5 and below. We also know that this is the range of websites which have very unreliable Alexa Rankings. Therefore, can we assume that there are a lot of publishers on TLA whose ad rates are very inaccurate because of how unreliable Alexa is in their traffic range?

The reason why i keep using Text Link Ads as an example is because TLA is one of the biggest ad networks to use Alexa in their ad rate calculations. I believe that the 50% they took from publishers is a little too high but their support is great, its a great way to make money and all in all i am very positive about TLA. Which is why i hope they start looking for alternatives to Alexa.

In the hope of someone from TLA reading this i want to give a suggestion

My suggestion on how Text Link Ads can rate traffic instead of Alexa

Every publisher on Text Link Ads has installed the code for text advertisements to be published. I’m not the worlds greatest programmer but surely it would be simple enough to add some sort of traffic tracking code. Every time the page is loaded TLA would know that another page impression has been registered for that publisher. I know that some publishers place the ad on one page whilst others place their text link ads on hundreds or even thousands though im sure an average of some kind could be found to help calculate the ad rate.

As i mentioned, TLA revenue will be a higher % of the overall income of blogs and sites with a page rank of 4 and below(generally speaking). These are the sites whose rankings are being skewed by Alexa.

What can you do?

From the blogs i’ve read, it seems most bloggers and website owners don’t rate Alexa and are not keen on advertising companies using Alexa to determine what they earn. I won’t go as far as saying they are hypocrites however i am noticing a lot of bloggers who are expressing their dislike for Alexa but continue to include the Alexa Stats box and using the redirect i mentioned to inflate their rankings.

If you agree with what i have said on my post then be part of the solution, not the problem. If you would like sites to stop using Alexa to calculate your publishing ad rate then post here and let others know how you feel.

Text Link Ads are a good company with good support and they have acknowledged how unreliable Alexa are. I’m sure that if enough of us voice our feelings over this TLA will look into an alternative. If you feel strongly about this i encourage you to email them using their contact form.

I do not want to preach to bloggers out there. I guess I can understand why people are choosing to inflate their alexa rankings because as it stands just now, you might make some extra cash by doing so. However, i want to stress that i I have and never will inflate my Alexa Ranking or promote them until their stats are more reliable

Whether you agree or disagree with me, i’d love to hear your view on this

Thanks,

Kevin Muldoon