Devil Works

Install the Alexa toolbar !

My opinion is that Alexa rankings are a load of crap. However, other sites use the Alexa ranking to calculate advertising rates and whether or not you are accepted into some affiliate programs.
I’ve had sites I haven’t even launched yet go up half a million spots in the rankings just because I was working on them with the Alexa toolbar installed.

If you really want to game the system get ten friends to install the toolbar and ask them to surf your site a few times a week.

I finally got around to start submitting the sites I wrote about here to Text Link Ads. The first couple I tried came back with the same scripted message.

We are sorry but your site has not been accepted into our publisher program at this time. The main reason for websites not being accepted is because of our minimum traffic and link popularity requirements. Please do note that we do reevaluate all submissions monthly and will notify you via email as soon as you are accepted. Hopefully soon!

While it was a little disappointing I wasn’t terribly surprised.  I’ve done nothing to promote these sites except add about 30 unique articles or postings.

So I guess my next step will be to get some inbound links…… hmmm, linkbait, or the old fashioned way.

Consider this, you’ve had a bloglines account for a while, you start reading about how good Googles reader is and you decided to set up an account. Being moderately clever you export your feeds from bloglines and load them into google. Seeing as bloglines is free you don’t worry about closing your account there but you find google so good that you’re not using your bloglines account at all.

But you’re still subscribed to both.

So as far as feedburner is concerned you’re now counted as two subscribers.

Now if your like me and can count your subscribers on both hands, even after a small accident with a power saw, then the stats don’t really matter. I’m not using them as a claim to fame, nor am I selling advertising based on my feed readership.

However recently John Chow and Darren Rowse couple of bloggers that I read reguraly reported there subscriber stats jumping in leaps and bounds.

I’m not having a go at these guys, they’re just reporting what they are seeing, but I’ve done a little testing and I have a strong feeling that the subscriber figures from feed burner are a little fudgy.

At least Feed Burner responded to the hype surrounding the increase in subscriber numbers and have given a pretty good explanation of what the numbers really mean.

update: I Found another blogger that thinks his readership has gone up by 50% since Feed Burner started including Google results. I don’t think so.