LinkBuilding vs Content

[Fergie]

Also my Alexa rating dropped drastically.

Off the topic of Links vs content, but it was brought up.

Alexa rank is meaningless.

Alexa only counts visits by people who have installed the alexa rank toolbar. This pretty much means visits from webmasters, IMO.

Also, if you are exchanging links you will have more webmaster visits to your site(s), so your rank will improve.

I used to have it installed in my browser. When it was installed my alexa ranks on all sites were very good. I figure it's because I visited them a lot myself. Now, without it, and without exchanging links, they look terrible. although my traffic remains steady and, in some cases, growing.

They are not a measure of the real traffic a site gets.

[TheGooner]

Interesting thoughts.

In my experience ... Alexa is an inexact measurement ... but not worthless.

Alexa does have all sorts of bias - US centric, webmaster centric, but with their AOL tie-in it's more than just those groups.

Anything below about 200,000 is a reflection of at least SOME human traffic, and below 100,000 a reasonable indication of traffic volumes.

For what it's worth ... I'd use ALEXA ahead of PR when evaluating the traffic factors of a potential exchange site.

Probably the most improtant reason why ALEXA rankings are valid is that advertsiers pay attention to them - and you can certainly charge more when you're in the top 50K of world sites.

[Dominique]

I should point out again that I DID exchange links the first year. After a year I got rid of them because of the many bad ones.

That year G&C was barely on the radar and it seemed that removing the links made no difference one way or another.

I do think entering directories did something, not immediately but in the long run.

For what it's worth, I don't think whether you make one or 100 posts on a forum with a link in your sig makes that much difference. Google listing of posts go to the forum anyway, and I think that google only counts all those links in the sigs as one per forum anyway.

[helpyou]

Dominique, that you are more expert of me,....

I think that this is right : "I don't think whether you make one or 1000 posts on a forum with a link in your sig makes that much difference"


I think this if you do 1000 post on 1000 different forums there is one difference.


I think that the links in forums can help the small website.
I think that the forum are helpfull for other ....( example find information, news .... )

[Dominique]

Dominique, that you are more expert of me,....

I think that this is right : "I don't think whether you make one or 1000 posts on a forum with a link in your sig makes that much difference"


I think this if you do 1000 post on 1000 different forums there is one difference.


I think that the links in forums can help the small website.
I think that the forum are helpfull for other ....( example find information, news .... )

Yes, that's what I mean.

If you post in a lot of forums, it counts as a link from each and that's why we have forum spammers.

Making lots of posts in a forum you like still only gives you one link.

[Fergie]

Interesting thoughts.

In my experience ... Alexa is an inexact measurement ... but not worthless.

Alexa does have all sorts of bias - US centric, webmaster centric, but with their AOL tie-in it's more than just those groups.

Anything below about 200,000 is a reflection of at least SOME human traffic, and below 100,000 a reasonable indication of traffic volumes.

For what it's worth ... I'd use ALEXA ahead of PR when evaluating the traffic factors of a potential exchange site.

Probably the most improtant reason why ALEXA rankings are valid is that advertsiers pay attention to them - and you can certainly charge more when you're in the top 50K of world sites.

When I was obsessed with Alexa ratings, I got one site under 100, and all of them were under 200. When I finally realized that particular ranking was bogus (My opinion), I uninstalled and forgot about it. Result: Even though there was no change in traffic (no negative change - but, as I said, some sites had growth in traffic which wasn't reflected at all on the alexa score, either), yet the alexa ranking sank quickly to well over 200 across all sites. Independent of unique traffic.

I agree that the most important reason why ALEXA rankings are valid is that advertisers pay attention to them. Alexa ranking means nothing EXCEPT to those advertisers who are uninformed and take it to reflect real traffic. As far as I could see, the only 'benefit' a good alexa score were unsolicited and unwanted phone calls from people wanting to advertise.

Also, Alexa is quite easy to game. Beyond simply having the toolbar installed while you work on your sites, if you want a good alexa ranking, you can get it. There are actually scripts and clubs which help to game alexa.

Regarding the AOL tie-in. One site of mine gets a ton of traffic from AOL, yet the alexa score is well over 200. WELL over! lol But, since I hadn't been paying attention to Alexa, I can't say whether or not this horrible rank had actually improved from an even more horrible rank since the AOL traffic started flooding in.

This side discussion regarding Alexa has renewed my interest. While I am quite firm in my opinion that Alexa rank has little or no value, I am interested in having a little fun with my own Alexa rankins. In view of this, I've started an experiment with my alexa ratings. Step one: Install Alexa.

Step two. This step requires help from you guys. If you have the Alexa toolbar installed, click on this : www.slottips.com , check out the horrible alexa rank from a site that gets a good deal of traffic from google and aol, see the score, then come back in a week and see if it's changed because of these clicks here. Like I said already, I don't give a hoot about alexa score, I'm just conducting a short experiment.

[Dominique]

Your experiment will work if people click.

One of the big drawbacks of alexa is that the results can be manipulated if you are so inclined.

Another is that the Alexa toolbar is classified as spyware by many spyware removal programs and thus is not much in use anymore.

[Deaddog]

see the score, then come back in a week

And just for the record, the score is 1,576,502.

[TheGooner]

I have Alexa - I visited ...


I also saw that :
- your site has been up since April 2004,
- you have over 260+ sites linking to you
- and that you got as low as 70,000 at one point for a brief time in 2006.


The "related links" were interesting too.

But who the hell is "SammyWebs" ?

[mgcasinos]

7 hours writing articles
2 hours surfing
0.5 hours on email
0.5 hours link exchange (one quality link/day)

[gayle]

Well, you just know I am going to say Content

My reasons are that well-placed keywords in an article will attract more google attention than a single link, plus you can receive several possible hits in a 500 word article.

Additionally, I have heard than more than 100 links at a site could cause Google to ignore you as a link-farm.

Unique content refeshed frequently is the way to go.

On a different note, I have started another thread as I am doing a survey of
webmasters who offer newsletters.
Do you add content/article/column in your newsletter?
IMO, those webmasters who only advertise the latest promotion/online casino are not giving their readers full value and will lose subscribers.

[northern]

Very useful thank you GamesandCasino w

[jagan]

I have seen myself that good articles as from contents point of view, when submitted in quality top web directories helps in keyword rankings!