This day turned out to be my saddest day as the author of VJ Czar World. The reason? My blog's Alexa rank dropped from something to nothing.
To let your works be read and seen by many people and to make your blog popular are I think, the main objectives of every blogger. To let your works be read and seen by many people is to increase your blog’s traffic. On the other hand, to make your blog popular is to achieve a high position in various blog/site ranking systems such as the Google PageRank and Alexa.
The loss of my Alexa rank has been both a disappointment and bewilderment. Disappointment because my efforts to make my blog visible in the blogosphere seem to have no effect at all; and bewilderment, in the sense that I just don’t understand why it happened when my blog’s traffic are considerably high.
Shortly after I knew this tragic event happened, I asked myself what were the things I recently did. I was thinking if there’s something that might be behind this, something that violated Alexa’s TOS, or something that triggered the Alexa bots to plunge my blog out of the chart.
Right now, I am suspecting two recent activities. First is the dealing with traffic exchange websites; and second, the pasting of RealRank codes on my blog.
Lately, I have been fairly hooked up with traffic exchanges. I’m doing it through websites such as TrafficEra.com and StartXchange.com. Their services have really boosted my blog’s traffic in just a very short span time. As effective as they are, I never think of them as clear agents of cheating my traffic. Instead, I look at them as something that gives me an opportunity to expose my blog to more internet users.
The last time I saw these websites, they were still bearing high Alexa ranks. But now, I was surprised when all their ranks got replaced with the statement “No rank data available”. I also looked at some of their competitor sites and found out that they're facing the same misfortune. I think Alexa bots were just reprogrammed to follow a new algorithm.
Meanwhile, for not so a long time, I’ve known that RealRank was made by IZEA, formerly known as PayPerPost (PPP). PayPerPost is a renowned paid-to-blog website which eventually became Google’s rival in terms of advertising strategies. Last year, Google slammed PayPerPost through lowering the PageRanks of its member bloggers. This had been a very drastic move because having a PageRank is a criterion in order to make money through PPP. Because of this blackmailing act, PPP created a new ranking system that would be replacing Google's PageRank. This system is the so-called RealRank. However, I got shocked when I found out the real score about it. RealRank was actually made to replace not only the Google PageRank but also the Alexa and ComScore ranks. Knowing these facts made me assume that Alexa has just done something to counter PPP. That counterattack may be the lowering the Alexa ranks of blogs/sites with RealRank scripts attached on them.
To test whether my suspicions are true or not, I opted to for a while stay away from one of these two activities. The engaging on traffic exchange sites was the one that I chose to avoid. Why just one? Well, let’s just say I am living with the principle “Take things one at a time”. Let’s see if I’ll retain my Alexa rank the moment I refrain from doing it.
p.s.
I’m not sad now.
Got relieved.
