Anglican Blogs – How do they stack up – Part the Second

Hmmm.

While it’s certainly nice to see so many conservative blogs “at the top” — as a person who engaged in Internet marketing full time for two years, and had that as a part of my job description for many many years in marketing at a couple of other corporations, I have to say that I basically ignore Alexa’s “rankings,” either good or bad.

Alexa data is gained from sites that have actually installed the Alexa toolbar — and the number of sites is simply too small, not to mention that measuring the traffic of a site based solely on a sample of websites willing to install the Alexa toolbar is automatically biasing in itself.

Some Internet marketing gurus claim that Alexa is good merely *comparatively* — I’ll link an article that makes that claim — but still, from my perspective Alexa rankings are utterly irrelevant because one can simply not depend on the accuracy.

For all we know, judging by Alexa’s accuracy, Thinking Anglicans may be the top-trafficked blog in this entire list. StandFirm may be just under Fulcrum and well under Anglican Mainstream.

We just don’t know, from Alexa rankings themselves, since Alexa is notoriously ill-trusted.

Here’s a quick note about Alexa from somebody who likes the comparative uses — but I just can’t go that far. Note too that he admits that Alexa really is purposeless for “lower traffic level” sites — and note his definition of “lower traffic.” ; > )

http://blog.searchenginewatch......730-133222

Of course, the debate has been ongoing for years:
http://glinden.blogspot.com/20.....trics.html

Some corporate Internet marketers may choose to believe Alexa rankings — although I suspect even those who do in the corporate world are extremely cautious and limited about their use in making Internet marketing decisions. I simply don’t count Alexa rankings in any of my decisions regarding Internet marketing nor do I use them to establish patterns or trends.

I mean — again, I’d love to imagine that SF is the “top-trafficked site” based on Alexa, and I suppose it could be. Or not. But it would be foolish, I think, for people to make changes in any way, based on what Alexa says about their traffic.

StandFirm, at least, doesn’t take those *particular* ranking tools seriously, although we do have other metrics we use to guage how we are doing in the blogging world that satisfy us, help us see where we are in relations to other blogs, and help us in how we make our decisions.

Aha. But you underestimate the power of the Liberal Conspiracy. Your Alexa figures merely show the huge numbers of us liberals coming to those naughty Conservative sites to check out what we should be getting upset about…

I beg to differ with Sarah on one point: Alexa rankings are not based on “sites that have actually installed the Alexa toolbar”, but on users who have installed that toolbar in their browsers. So what this table shows, fairly directly, is that conservatives make more use of the two browsers which Alexa supports (Firefox and IE Explorer) than do liberals.

Oh no. I use Firefox. Does that mean that underneath this wooly liberal exterior there’s a closet conservative screaming to get out…?

Hi Peter,
My Alexa rank is