Alexa Related Links

[WildSeeker]

Greetings!

I have a general question about Alexa. How does it pull together what it deems 'related links'. My site - http://www.wildseeker.com - has been 'live' for about six months now and it still does not have any related links on Alexa. Any thoughts on Alexa?

[Leisa]

Hi WildSeeker! Are you saying that you want to be listed as a related link for other sites or have related links listed for your site?

[WildSeeker]

I am really curious how the whole 'related links' process works with Alexa. It certainly would be nice to have my site listed as a related link for other sites.

What has drawn my my attention to it is the fact that when I pull up my site there are no related links. Is it a function or users with the Alexa toolbar who view a particular site and then view others? Basically, how are related sites determined?

[minstrel]

It's been a while since I looked closely at Alexa because I decided that the concept was flawed, but as I understood it at the time "related sites" were basically "people who visited your site also visited these sites" - i.e., it's based on their database derived from the web surfing habits of individuals who installed Alexa on their systems.

[ronniethedodger]

I was also under the impression that anyone could submit related site info via a form at Alexa also. They do not need to be an Alexa Toolbar user to do this.

I tried submitting my site to various sites that were truely related (translation: competitor sites). After the submission I recieved their stock email reply that it will be reviewed and there is no guarantee that they will be listed...blah...blah...blah.

To date the "no gurantee that they will be included" is correct, for my site still has not been listed as a related site. Whether they review it or not, is another question. My belief is that they do not have the manpower or time to do thorough enough research into these matters.

Users have the option to turn off a feature in the toolbar that keeps a history of the last 10 or 15 pages that you visit -- it is called "The Web I Built" feature. I have this option turned off, for I do believe that is how they compile the related site information. I do not want it knowing my surfing habits, because I bounce around between my site and competitor sites all too frequently.

Whether or not the accuracy of other features at Alexa are in question is becoming a moot point. Some search engines are using the Alexa data for Traffic Detail and the Related Sites to feed their results with. I forget offhand right now which search engines are using this data, but there is more than one of them and it appears that they are worth taking notice of and learning how to take advantage of it.

All that aside -- the stranger information that they serve up is the Sites Linking In. I have reviewed other sites as well as my own, and there is no rhyme or reason to how they come up with this data. All too often a majority of these linkbacks are to cgi driven search queries at various ISP home pages. The linkbacks are not the traditional links that you would see anywhere else like Google, Alta Vista, AllTheWeb, etc.

I am in agreement with Minstrel in that this all seems flawed. But I would also add that this is a unique opportunity to exploit that weakness.

[minstrel]

I would also add that this is a unique opportunity to exploit that weakness.

That's part of what worries me about the concept. At this point, I am only aware of one SE using Alexa but frankly I hope the notion doesn't spread...

[ronniethedodger]

...frankly I hope the notion doesn't spread...

Then we will just keep that between ourselves for the time being !! ;-)

[WildSeeker]

What would you suppose that the Alexa spider is looking for when it crawls a site. Assuming they are building their related links from traffic that is tracked on user's Alexa toolbar and their back-link references are a bit obscure, what could the spider be doing?

I tried submitting my site to various sites that were truely related

I too have attempted to submit related links to no success. The information coming to light in this thread certainly does bring into question the value that Alexa is providing. It appears the value is more to Alexa than any other particular user.

[kjohnson5576]

As far as I can tell, the Alexa Spider doesn't spider very often. The picture from my site is about 5 months old. This is the holiday season and I'm getting tremendous amounts of traffic, 2X my average, yet my traffic rank hasn't moved in a month or so.

Alexa listed my incoming links about 2 months ago for the first time in almost a year, and it hasn't changed them again.

What they have changed is the people who have reviewed my site. I had 6 reviews, now I have 4. The names of the people were listed, now, no names. It also takes you to Amazon.com to read the reviews, not to an Alexa page.

Quite frankly, I don't know what Alexa is doing or hopes to do with its data. Anyone know what their plan is? or was?

[ronniethedodger]

The information coming to light in this thread certainly does bring into question the value that Alexa is providing. It appears the value is more to Alexa than any other particular user.

The value to Alexa, is the value to Amazon. They are one in the same.

The purpose of the toolbar is two-fold. It is Amazon's way of tracking traffic patterns, and having the ever present link to their site on the toolbar itself.

I am also seeing some rise in popularity among website owners, in that they are promoting the so-called branded toolbar more and more.

If the toolbar gains any momentum at all, then the results that Alexa reports "should" come more and more into line with actual traffic trends. How they choose to serve up the results of this data will then begin to show what kind of integrity they have.

As for the Alexa Spider ... they crawl into places that other spiders are not even aware of.

I have an Apache Server running on my computer for testing purposes. The IP address of the server is a dynamic one and not known to any NSP services, etc.

I accessed this server thru the Internet with the Alexa Toolbar running with the option for history tracking selected. The toolbar did make note of the IP address and within 48 hours, it had crawled the entire root directory of the server. Shortly after that my server was listed on Alexa, complete with a thumbnail image of the Index page.