AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums Talk Belize Chat Area Analyzing website traffic and promotion

Marty,

Very interesting thread, I am wondering as an advertiser if there are months that the numbers spike/dip as that'd be handy when I'm thinking of doing increased advertising, special promotions etc. Just a thought, drop me a line (at the yahoo addy)later.

Thanks,
Chris

IRC would be cool especially during hurricane season.

From a command prompt type "uname -a". This will tell you lots of info on the machine you are running on. If you want to learn about the uname command type "man uname". This will print out the "manual" for that command.

i was asked how to find information on a websites traffic that isn't one's own website.

peek here:
http://alexa.com/

type in a web address

when you get results, click on the traffic details tab. lotsa info in there. plus you can even compare traffic between other sites.

just did that for ambergriscaye.com and i see it gets considerably more traffic than belize.com, belize.net, belizenet.com, or any other belizean website i typed in. cool.

we're number 120,644 in website traffic
out of all the websites on the planet

not bad really

Traffic Rank for belizenet.com: 379,709
Traffic Rank for belizeit.com: 1,021,643
Traffic Rank for belize.com: 177,485
Traffic Rank for goambergriscaye.com: 1,750,254
Traffic Rank for belize.net: 541,685
Traffic Rank for cnn.com: 24
Traffic Rank for sanpedrosun.net: 800,093
Traffic Rank for ambergristoday.com: 3,050,629

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't advertiser care more about this info than someone clicking through to thier website?? I remember when we started our website we couldn't give away ads, now that we generate over 5000 unique hits a day advertisers are more interested mostly because they are more interested in keeping their sites google ranking high. More hits to sites where their ads are = higher google ranking.

to some extent. google uses an changing algorithm for their results, one thing is number of hits to sites whre ads are higher. but its lower on their criteria i believe, i mean i don't know their exact criteria, no one does, trade secret. but i have ben inputtiing sites into search engiens for 12 years, and i know what works and what doesn't.

ambergriscaye.com has never bought even one ad ever. i think its a waste of money. and AmbergrisCaye.com ranks very high in Google under many search criteria. We have over 39,000 pages indexed by Google on just AmbergrisCaye.com. We're ranked 14th out of 76,300,000 using the search term "Belize," and are first using the search terms "Ambergris Caye."

i hate banner ads with a passion. we have zero on ac.com. i have been offered ridiculous money to do it. no. detail work and concentration and experiment with meta tags and the text on one's website are the main criteria for doing well in google. give them information and they will come. thats always been my theory. throw a bunch of splashy ads and i don't know if they will still come cause i hate ads and will not use them. i go straight to print only versions if available of all news pages for instance.

the web equivalent of tivo.

we could make a bunch putting GOOGLE ADS or the like all over various places, say in the listings for this site and all other Belizean sites that is at http://BelizeSearch.com. but no no no no no i'm a stubborn taurus boy. to move me you need a bulldozer.

Question:
How are Alexa's traffic rankings determined?
Common Questions

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1.

Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide seperate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.

About the Alexa Traffic Rankings

A listing of all sites on the Web, sorted by traffic...

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.

What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

What are sites and Web hosts?
Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the domain level. For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com and slate.msn.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com. An exception is personal home pages, which are treated separately if they can be automatically identified as such from the URLs in question. Also, sites which are found to be serving the "same" content are generally counted together as the same site.

What is Reach?
Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago.

What are Page Views?
Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three month ago.

Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site. For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000 page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com. If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site).

Some Important Disclaimers

The traffic data are based on the set of Alexa users, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:

* Our users are disproportionately likely to visit alexa.com, amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be substantially overcounted.
* In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.


In addition to the biases above, the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa's data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

i know google takes out sites that abuse like putting a million times belize in white text on a white background at the bottom of a page and all kinds of lil games like that. having my own spider now i know why. it just ruings your results. so overuse of keywords will get one flat booted nowadays.

here's the how to page at google. pay attention to things to avoid. they mean it.

How do I add my site to Google's search results?

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis to find sites to add to our index. The vast majority of sites listed in our results are not manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

To determine whether your site is currently included in Google's index, just perform a search for your site's URL. For example, a search for [ site:Google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.google.com+

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

- The site isn't well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
- The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
- The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.

Our intent is to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately. To help make this goal a reality, we offer guidelines for building a "crawler-friendly" site. Our guidelines are located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. While there are no guarantees that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase your site's chances of showing up in our search results.

THINGS TO DO

Provide high-quality content on your pages -- especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include them on your site.

Make sure that other sites link to yours. Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our measure of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives to determine its PageRank, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Please note that ranking of sites in our search results is completely automated, and we do not manually assign keywords to sites.

Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. If certain areas are not linked, you may be excluding older browsers, some users, and Google.

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.

Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you do, don't forget to add the dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.

Consider creating and submitting a detailed Sitemap of your pages using Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and of any updates you make to those pages. To learn more about Google Sitemaps, visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

THINGS TO AVOID

Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you do not intend visitors to see, Google considers them deceptive and may ignore your site.

Don't feel obligated to purchase a search optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.

Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT tags if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. In order to ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file.

For information about using a robots.txt file, please visit:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html

Will participation in AdWords or AdSense affect my listing in Google's free search results?

Google's advertising programs are independent of our search results. Search results display on the left side of our results page; ads appear on the right and in the colored box at the top.

Participation in an advertising program doesn't positively or negatively affect inclusion or ranking in the Google search results. Inclusion and ranking are free services; we don't accept payment to expedite inclusion or improve a site's ranking for particular keywords.


Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results.

Introduction

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's we've networked together to create a superfast search engine.

The heart of our software is PageRank�, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
Integrity

Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.

from a friend

Had forgotten about Alexa. Had the toolbar installed a while back, just to explore. Then uninstalled as I felt uncomfortable with them tracking everywhere I went. Which leads me to this conclusion- Alexa is only as reliable as the users who have installed the Alexa toolbar - probably a small percentage of surfers. It's my understanding the #'s only represent vistors to any given site who have installed it. But good for comparing the apples to apples, only make sense that the same people visiting us may be visiting competition.

======================
so think of alexa as like the nielsen ratings for television

Google's system strives to elevate in search results the Web sites with content most relevant to a request. Because Google handles far more search requests than its rivals, its ranking system can make or break Web sites without a well-known domain name.

With the stakes so high, Web sites assigned a low Google ranking are constantly trying to elevate their standing, and an entire cottage industry has formed surrounding search engine optimization. Some sites resort to dirty tricks, hoping the shenanigans will fool Google into highlighting their Web links.

Google regularly tweaks its search formula to weed out the mischief makers _ sometimes called "Black Hats." In the worst cases, Google exiles the manipulative Web sites, a practice that has become known as being sent to "the sandbox" for the equivalent of a children's time out.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/03/17/D8GDKG900.html