Week 9 of the Alexa Project

Tweet

The good news is that my score has improved signicantly from its start of 1,025,188. However, these last few weeks has found my score's daily change improving less and less. Look for yourself at the graph at the end of this post. The red is my actual Alexa score. The yellow is the computed daily change between each reading. In the beginning, the yellow plot is high, showing vast improvement in my score. At times, a drop of over 25,000 points per day. Lately, I'm now dropping slightly over 2,000 points a day. What is changing? Less visits from members of our Alexa Project? At this point, I don't know. When I get a moment, I need to check to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

I do thank everyone who has visited my site. Robyn has over 170 links for us to visit. With my schedule, it takes me two days to make my rounds.

Embracing Alexa

Tweet

Because I spent so much time in the fighting spyware and virus, my immediate reaction to PPP's use of Alexa was tremendously negative. And rightly so. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Alexa promoted itself as a Internet Explorer addon in the form of a search engine toolbar. What people didn't know what that it was tracking and reporting their every movement about the Internet. Hence it earned the label "spyware". A few years ago, Alexa finally changed and openly let people know its true function, thus stepping outside the definition of spyware. Now you knowingly give up your privacy when you install Alexa onto your browser. Surprisingly many people have done so, enough that Amazon bought Alexa because of it's tracking potential. Imagine having a store in the mall and being able to track every visitor's stop and purchase in that mall - which store, what item, how much.

So then, the rating score simply relates to how many browsers have visited a given site with the Alexa toolbar installed. Nothing to do with representing all the Internet traffic. Fair enough. The Alexa website even carries the disclaim that they are NOT an accurate representation of Internet traffic. Good. With that understand, I can now accept that there is nothing fraudulent about Alexa itself. But what about it usage?

Since I've installed it in my browser, my score has improved (to 806,667 as of today). My surfing habits have NOT changed except to include visits to sites of several new friends. In fact, several of us have 'gone to the dark side' and added Alexa to our browsers. Because of this, there are now posts on PPP forums and blogs accusing us of fraudulent activity - by 'gaming' of the system. Yet, all we have done is make sure Alexa counts our sites now. The first time I pass through the Alexa turnstile for day, I get one count. No matter, how many times I return, it's remains one count. So I can't force the number higher by myself. Nothing fraudulent here.

The ball falls on PayPerPost then. Are they assuming that their advertisers fully understand the nature of Alexa score? Are they simply toting the fact that an advertiser has 'choices' in the way a salesman would go on about features he doesn't understand or want to explain? Or has PPP put an explanation to go with Alexa and other options available to advertisers? How can any advertiser fully utilize PayPerPost if they don't have a complete understand of what PPP offers? Time will tell, I guess.

Hurray, Another Drop In My Score

Tweet

Sometime between 5:30 this evening and 7:30, my Alexa score dropped to 962,713 from 1,001,770 - a drop of 39,057 this time. Does this mean that there is a four day pause between score updates? Hopefully PPP will reflect this change on their site tomorrow. The gaming experiment continues ...

My Alexa Score Improved Within 24 hours!

Tweet

On Wednesday night, my Alexa score was 1,025,188. Last night, some time between 9pm and 11pm, it decreased to 1,001,770. All I did refresh my page every so often on three different computers. This is very encouraging! Now if only PPP would update their records according. Thanks to their snafu, I haven't been able to blog for them. This morning, I found that I had been bumped out of the top ten list by a Malaysian woman who has about 50 million blogs. No problem for her to post! In any case, let's see how good I can make my score.