Comments on: Insight#4: Of Alexa, Dmoz & Technorati

By: Timon Weller

Timon Weller — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:33:40 +0000

Dmoz hardly ever excepts nowadays… Its like the lottery.. it does not even matter if you website is top alexa rankings… helps to be an editor or know one…

By: john

john — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:18:23 +0000

Thanks so very much for taking your time to create this very useful and informative site. I have learned a lot from your site. Thanks!!

By: halter

halter — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:45:38 +0000

Given the circumstances you report and the Feed Validator complaint about the Atom feed, I would suggest trying just the RSS feed on your site.

BTW – Why did you stop using Feedburner

By: Mark Putnam

Mark Putnam — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:58:25 +0000

Technorati’s customer support is nil they flagged my blog Lame News over a week ago, they are ever inactive in their forums.

By: J.K.

J.K. — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:03:35 +0000

Update: Weird. Alexa Traffic Rank for clappingtrees.com is now: 1,205,997. This is closer to the ranking I last saw on Technorati when my blog was claimed halfway. However, apparently, not a single post from this blog has been picked up by Technorati. Also found this article on more Alexa errors: Alexa error triggers crisis of confidence. Afternote 2007-03-28: "...Technorati is no longer presenting the most complete and accurate picture of behavior in the blogosphere--and hasn't been for a while..." wrote digital media analyst Susan Mernit on 10th March in a post entitled "What's popular in the blogosphere--at this very second--and why those stats are just plain wrong" (scroll down to find the post). Afternote 2007-05-16: Alexa Traffic Rank for clappingtrees.com is now: 493,400.

By: Robert Irizarry

Robert Irizarry — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:15:11 +0000

I was wondering how the feed issue was coming. Any luck with reconfiguring it? There must be some Wordpress folks here who could lend some assistance…

By: J.K.

J.K. — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:29:44 +0000

Yes, I found it too. Now looking at it. Not quite sure what I did. From what I remember — merely filled up a field on form and clicked Submit.

Regarding FeedBurner, I read somewhere that it’s not advisable to give a third-party control over our subscribers and that in the long run, we could get overly dependent on FeedBurner (even at its mercy).

By: Robert Irizarry

Robert Irizarry — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:08:37 +0000

Hi JK – Unfortunately, I’m on Blogger not Wordpress so my familiarity is rather limited. However, I was checking out the Wordpress help and found this page which discusses changing the feed format – http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_Feeds

Given the circumstances you report and the Feed Validator complaint about the Atom feed, I would suggest trying just the RSS feed on your site.

BTW – Why did you stop using Feedburner?

By: J.K.

J.K. — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:52:40 +0000

Robert, my Technorati issue has been around for months while I stopped using FeedBurner and started adding an Atom only recently (one or two weeks perhaps). Still, I just tried adding a feed by clicking on the RSS button. Managed to subscribe to Google Reader without a hitch.

Strange. Now, I cannot remember or find where exactly did I make the feed change. Could you tell me? TIA.

By: Robert Irizarry

Robert Irizarry — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:05:20 +0000

I wonder if your Technorati issue has something to do with the following:

1. Subscribed to your RSS feed by clicking on the RSS button that appears in Firefox at the end of your site URL.

When I review the feed url it reads as http://www.clappingtrees.com/feed/atom/

Trying this URL in Feed Validator (http://feedvalidator.org/) results in a not supported message.

However, enter http://www.clappingtrees.com at Feed Validator and it responds with a different feed url – http://www.clappingtrees.com/feed/rss/ with a message that the feed is valid.

Could the problem be that Technorati is seeing the first feed url vs. the second feed url and not understanding it?

By: J.K.

J.K. — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:57:14 +0000

Update: Alexa Traffic Rank for clappingtrees.com is now: 2,684,317. I've yet to install the Alexa toolbar on my browser. So, what has happened? Someone doing me a favor? Thanks to some visiting web strategists? As for Technorati: The problem remains while the number of inbound links to my blog increases (thanks to my new online friends). For some background information on this problem, please check out the I cannot claim my blog thread on one of the Technorati support forums.

By: J.K.

J.K. — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 03:19:35 +0000

Update: Alexa Traffic Rank for clappingtrees.com is now: 4,034,014.

The “People who visit this page also visit” item now lists The Search Engine Journal and Blog Her.

It’s truly tempting to do what John Chow said would work: “Just get a few friends to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday. It does not take many people to break into the top 100,000. You can even do it all by yourself by refreshing your site over and over again. Get a dozen friends to do it and you’re break into top 20,000 easily.”

Hmmm… maybe I can do this in a training workshop just to illustrate how Alexa works?

By: J.K.

J.K. — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:17:45 +0000

Actually, I’ve managed to claim two blogs without any hitch on Technorati. One was created for someone else. The other was a pretty casual one — basically a video blog and curiously started to appear in Technorati only a few days ago when I did a search on “clappingtrees”. So, I simply claimed it. With this serious blog however, claiming has become an uphill job! I truly don’t understand why.

Regarding Alexa, yes, I’ve suspected that its sample size must be relatively small. Thanks for confirming this with statistics.

By: Lucas McDonnell

Lucas McDonnell — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:53:11 +0000

While I’ve never had much of a problem with my sites on Technorati, I have found Alexa’s rankings to fluctuate greatly and be generally misleading. Alexa’s ‘random sample’ of web users is really a sample of people who would either willingly install the Alexa toolbar, or didn’t know what it was when they installed it.

According to Wikipedia, Alexa’s actual sample size is probably around 180 000. Personally, as I’ve seen my unique visitors slowly climb on my site, I’ve also seen my Alexa rating drop dramatically. Not to mention the fact that Alexa is borderline spyware that often gets redistributed with other gray-area software.