Unfortunately Alexa didn’t make it. After stopping to count again yet again, Dr. Stern did all he could to bring the service back. Rest in peace Alexa, rest in peace.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Alexa, oh Alexa, how you kill thee. I’ve written and spoken about Alexa since they began operations nearly a decade ago. I’ve watched agencies pitch advertising based on Alexa charts. There are still ad networks that use Alexa rankings as a baseline for pricing Web site advertising.

Considering how wrong Alexa is, I’ve wondered for a long time who would be the first one to sue Alexa for an incorrect ranking. For sites that drive revenue from advertising, an incorrect ranking can impact their direct ability to generate revenue.

Alexa changed their ranking model back in April and since then everything has gone downhill for most sites I track. Currently CN has a 1-week average rank of 194,000 while my other site HTMLCenter has a rank of 78,000. There’s only one issue, CN has 6-10x more traffic on average than HTMLCenter does.

Here are some additional thoughts in my Alexa video:

Daniel Scocco compared 15 Web sites using Alexa, Compete and Google Trends. It’s interesting to see just how off Alexa is overall. Andy Beard believes that Alexa is no longer counting social media traffic and that’s why we have seen even more ranking drops for sites that rely on social media traffic. I would tend to agree with Andy but CN has very little social media traffic - we had one digg frontpage in the last 60 days.

If Alexa is removing social media traffic (they haven’t said anything yet about this latest change), that’s an excellent step forward. I’ve said before that just because a site has more raw pageviews than another, doesn’t mean it’s worth anything more - especially if they are gaming the social media sites. But I am not convinced Alexa has made this change.

I’ve tried sending emails to Alexa, but I have never received a reply. Which is so unlike Amazon considering how responsive and fast they are to customer service emails. It’s almost like Bezos ignores Alexa for some unknown reason.

Perhaps it’s finally time to turn off Alexa.

More CN Coverage:
– Docstoc
– Scribd
– Twitter

Aah, Alexa - the statistics service that told us last month that they fixed themselves — our tests indicated they weren’t more accurate than before.

Back in February we reported that Alexa had "stopped counting" for nearly 10 days. I wondered if anyone actually cared that the service stopped updating as no one was talking about it. Today, Duncan Riley reports that once again they have stopped counting. The graphs last updated on May 19th, nearly 10 days ago. The graphic to the right displays what I see when I browse Alexa’s data. Duncan also notes that Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million.

It does appear that the numbers in the charts might be updating - the CN rank appears to continue to drop though our traffic hasn’t dropped. Of all of the sites I tested, we lost the largest number of slots when they changed their ranking process - nearly 90,000 slots!

Alexa’s blog hasn’t been updated in a week and there’s no status blog. Maybe they see that with Twitter, outages get them more buzz… who knows but I’d prefer that Alexa post a notice that the service is not functioning correctly. Sadly many marketers and ad agencies still use Alexa to help them base marketing and advertising decisions on.

C’mon Alexa, we give you chance after chance - fix it or shut it down until you do so.

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Earlier this evening, we reported on Alexa’s ratings model changes and suggested that if more accurate it could help Alexa build a new trust with their users. It appears that the new Alexa model isn’t much better than the original model on our first tests.

CN dropped from ~25,000 to ~76,000 which is a shocking drop of 51,000 spots. I actually believe this is a huge mistake and is the highest drop I’ve seen so far. Yet our sister site, HTMLCenter actually moved up about 30,000 spots and now sits at ~95,000. The kicker is this: HTMLCenter currently has 15% of the traffic that CN has.

Other sites that have reported in on ranking changes:

• modernmom.com gained 30,000 spots
• CLRSearch.com gained 80,000 spots
• Sleep.fm moved up 125,000 spots and they are in private beta!

Alexa staff, if you are reading this - I’d love a chat with you even if it’s off the record.

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Ranking service Alexa has decided that their old ranking system was garbage and they have launched a new one today! Rejoice fellow patrons of the Internet! Alexa has a news bulletin that you should all read (seriously) about how their rankings have changed. Basically they state that users have asked over the past couple of months for more than just Alexa toolbars for ranking purposes. I guess they don’t read CN nor any of my emails to them since 2000-2001, they would have seen that request way earlier on, and certainly before they dropped in importance. Will these ranking changes bring Alexa back as a ranking leader? As much as I would like to say yes, we will need to see progress over time.

I’d like to see Alexa stand up and state what the sources they are using to rank sites.

Compete and Quantcast appear to be eating Alexa’s lunch as both services are offering more than just a ratings service. For example, Compete regularly provides industry analysis. The truth is that every single rankings service is semi-accurate, none of them should be taken as a final measure.

Some examples of the shifts:

• CenterNetworks lost 50,000 spots - the biggest drop I’ve seen so far
• AlleyInsider kept their ranking
• Techcrunch dropped about 400 spots
• Mashable seemed to pick up a few spots
• ReadWriteWeb kept their ranking

If you are a media buyer and you are making decisions solely based on an Alexa chart (I know you are out there, I’ve seen it), you deserve to lose your shirt. And if any Web agency pitches you on a media buy and shows Alexa charts, fire them immediately. No single ratings source should be used for a media buy, especially not today in this social media world. Check out my article on why you should never bring Alexa to a fight.

Update: It also looks like Alexa has removed the 125 pixel ads they were selling and replaced them with traditional run-of-network banners. I heard from a couple of advertisers in the 125 pixel ads that they were very poor performing placements. Which to be honest was a shock given how popular Alexa is - I thought the ads would do quite well.

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This discussion is about four topics related to Mahalo (and the general Internet):

1. Is Mahalo a clone of Hakia Gallery?
2. Corporate social tool usage
3. Where does Mahalo get their high Alexa ranking from?
4. Positive employee feedback and encouragement from management

Mahalo: A Hakia Clone?

Last week I met with semantic search engine Hakia.  One of the features they demo’ed to me is the "Hakia Gallery". The Gallery is a partially human-edited results for over several thousand results. The immediate reaction I had was "Is Mahalo a Hakia clone?" - do a search for cancer on both Hakia and Mahalo to see an example. Mahalo probably wins a point on design but gives up multiple points as the Hakia Gallery uses some human and some computer to create a much more robust page. So is Mahalo a clone? We already know that Jason knows how to clone… see Netscape.

Update: Based on my offline emails with Jason regarding this section, here is my clarification. I am in no way suggesting that Mahalo lifted any design elements from Hakia. I am merely noting that the pages are similar. I think Mahalo’s design is easier on the eyes and Hakia’s technology appears better by combining human-edited results plus their search technology. Also, please note that the link to Netscape being a Digg clone goes to TechCrunch.

Mahalo’s social media usage

One of the ways Mahalo is getting traffic is by leveraging their employees and contractors to submit and vote up stories on the social media sites. Here is an example post on the news group:

When I first came across this, I was completely outraged. How could a CEO ask his or her employees to digg, reddit, stumble, scape a story to get it on the front page. It’s one thing to ask some buddies to help out with a digg, but for a corporation to ask their employees to do this, just seemed wrong, very wrong.

I decided to hold off posting about this as I wanted to really think about it. And here is the conclusion I came to. It’s ok in moderation. I guess there is no difference to this type of cheerleading as if Ford asked their employees to pass out Ford info as they walk in a park. Jason isn’t forcing the employees to vote, nor is he asking for positive votes. As Mahalo grows in number of employees/contractors, we will see more Mahalo stories hit the front page. I do wonder, if the social sites were all "corporate run" would the largest corporations always make the front page of x site?

Investigating Mahalo’s Alexa ranking

Jason has touted his Alexa ranking (for whatever its worth, which is basically nil) all over the Internet, mostly at Valleywag. And currently Mahalo sits at a rank of 5,267 for the 3-month average and an awesome 3,256 for last week. I decided to put on my Columbo analytics hat and have a look deeper (ok, only as deep as Alexa goes!). Here is the chart of number of pageviews and what parts of the Mahalo site are generating the traffic:

Ten pageviews per visitor - who wouldn’t love that! And then we see where the traffic is coming from. Almost half of the traffic is to internal, non-public sections of Mahalo. Greenhouse is the section of the site where the "guides" work on creating the pages that appear on Mahalo. And this means that at least a portion of the guides are using the Alexa toolbar. When you enter the Greenhouse, you search for the terms that you might want to write a results-page for. But it might take you 20 searches to find a page that isn’t created already. Hence the 9.8 pageviews per visitor!

Now back to that 5,267 ranking. Since we know that ~50% of the traffic is to internal sections and we know that the majority of views are from guides, we can apply this to the other ~50 of the traffic that is going to the main Mahalo.com site. In essence, the majority of the traffic to Mahalo is actually internal, employee traffic! I wonder what their ranking would be if this was removed. My HP10B++ estimates it to be in the 60-80k range.

Jason is smart, very smart. Get your employees to use a publicly available tool and over time, as you increase employees, you increase monetizable page views. Even if it’s not on his radar today, it should be. Imagine if you had 1 million page views, and your employees added another 3 million creating pages to support the other 1 million. To the average Internet marketer (i.e. most of the ones I have dealt with), that’s 4 million page views to buy/sell! Genius!

Employee Encouragement

The last part of this conversation is around employee encouragement and feedback. Jason has done a great job here. Since Jason is so public online, it’s easy to tell when he is having a bad day. I have watched him throw a fit on x person or y site and just a few minutes later congratulate the guides on Mahalo. It’s so critical to give your employees the encouragement they need to be satisfied. Writing search pages is probably about as boring (most times) as watching paint dry.

But if you can get people excited about the work they are doing, they will feel better about it. I hope this post encourages Jason to talk about employee encouragement in the Web worker field. I have managed teams for years now and it’s easy to walk over to someone’s desk and tell them how great a job they did. But online where your workers are spread out, it’s not as easy. Might be a great niche there for someone to blog about!

This discussion is about four topics related to Mahalo (and the general Internet):

1. Is Mahalo a clone of Hakia Gallery?
2. Corporate social tool usage
3. Where does Mahalo get their high Alexa ranking from?
4. Positive employee feedback and encouragement from management

Mahalo: A Hakia Clone?

Last week I met with semantic search engine Hakia.  One of the features they demo’ed to me is the "Hakia Gallery". The Gallery is a partially human-edited results for over several thousand results. The immediate reaction I had was "Is Mahalo a Hakia clone?" - do a search for cancer on both Hakia and Mahalo to see an example. Mahalo probably wins a point on design but gives up multiple points as the Hakia Gallery uses some human and some computer to create a much more robust page. So is Mahalo a clone? We already know that Jason knows how to clone… see Netscape

Mahalo’s social media usage

One of the ways Mahalo is getting traffic is by leveraging their employees and contractors to submit and vote up stories on the social media sites. Here is an example post on the news group:

When I first came across this, I was completely outraged. How could a CEO ask his or her employees to digg, reddit, stumble, scape a story to get it on the front page. It’s one thing to ask some buddies to help out with a digg, but for a corporation to ask their employees to do this, just seemed wrong, very wrong.

I decided to hold off posting about this as I wanted to really think about it. And here is the conclusion I came to. It’s ok in moderation. I guess there is no difference to this type of cheerleading as if Ford asked their employees to pass out Ford info as they walk in a park. Jason isn’t forcing the employees to vote, nor is he asking for positive votes. As Mahalo grows in number of employees/contractors, we will see more Mahalo stories hit the front page. I do wonder, if the social sites were all "corporate run" would the largest corporations always make the front page of x site?

Investigating Mahalo’s Alexa ranking

Jason has touted his Alexa ranking (for whatever its worth, which is basically nil) all over the Internet, mostly at Valleywag. And currently Mahalo sits at a rank of 5,267 for the 3-month average and an awesome 3,256 for last week. I decided to put on my Columbo analytics hat and have a look deeper (ok, only as deep as Alexa goes!). Here is the chart of number of pageviews and what parts of the Mahalo site are generating the traffic:

Ten pageviews per visitor - who wouldn’t love that! And then we see where the traffic is coming from. Almost half of the traffic is to internal, non-public sections of Mahalo. Greenhouse is the section of the site where the "guides" work on creating the pages that appear on Mahalo. And this means that at least a portion of the guides are using the Alexa toolbar. When you enter the Greenhouse, you search for the terms that you might want to write a results-page for. But it might take you 20 searches to find a page that isn’t created already. Hence the 9.8 pageviews per visitor!

Now back to that 5,267 ranking. Since we know that ~50% of the traffic is to internal sections and we know that the majority of views are from guides, we can apply this to the other ~50 of the traffic that is going to the main Mahalo.com site. In essence, the majority of the traffic to Mahalo is actually internal, employee traffic! I wonder what their ranking would be if this was removed. My HP10B++ estimates it to be in the 60-80k range.

Jason is smart, very smart. Get your employees to use a publicly available tool and over time, as you increase employees, you increase monetizable page views. Even if it’s not on his radar today, it should be. Imagine if you had 1 million page views, and your employees added another 3 million creating pages to support the other 1 million. To the average Internet marketer (i.e. most of the ones I have dealt with), that’s 4 million page views to buy/sell! Genius!

Employee Encouragement

The last part of this conversation is around employee encouragement and feedback. Jason has done a great job here. Since Jason is so public online, it’s easy to tell when he is having a bad day. I have watched him throw a fit on x person or y site and just a few minutes later congratulate the guides on Mahalo. It’s so critical to give your employees the encouragement they need to be satisfied. Writing search pages is probably about as boring (most times) as watching paint dry.

But if you can get people excited about the work they are doing, they will feel better about it. I hope this post encourages Jason to talk about employee encouragement in the Web worker field. I have managed teams for years now and it’s easy to walk over to someone’s desk and tell them how great a job they did. But online where your workers are spread out, it’s not as easy. Might be a great niche there for someone to blog about!