Great News, a 600,000 drop in traffic rank

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Alexa, a Web search and site statistics company, had wrongly merged CMS Report with a couple other unrelated sites under uly.net. At the time my traffic rank stood at 218,200. Luckily, Alexa has a procedure that lets you contact them so they can separate your site from the other sites.

In that story, I also mentioned that:

Ironically, my site may initially be worse off in Alexa's traffic ranks by separating it as its own site. Once my site is separated from the other sites I'm not so sure the 98% of the traffic I've contributed in the past to uly.net's ranking will travel to cmsreport.com.

Well my conjecture wasn't wrong. Earlier this week, as promised by Alexa cmsreport.com became its own site under their traffic ranks.

Initially, CMS Report, was given a three month traffic ranking of 830,790 which would be close to a 400% drop in Alexa's traffic ranking. Currently, I couldn't be happier. That's because my weekly stats were ranked around 125,000 which indicates a promising future for this site and my stats through Alexa.

Listed below are my current statistics with Alexa.com. Hopefully by the time you read this my three month stats with Alexa will be much better than my initial week with them. As of this writing, Alexa still has to update their screenshot for cmsreport.com. Disclaimer: clicking on images forwards you to Amazon's review site.

Note: Removed image as it contained script that many RSS feeds didn't like. For latest Alexa stats, try this link.


Traffic Rank and Site Confusion at Alexa

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on

A few months ago I came across Alexa Web Search for the very first time. Alexa not only offers the usual search engine features, but also additional site statistics dealing with traffic ranking. Naturally, I entered my own site into the rankings to see what I could find. Considering my site has been around for only six months I was impressed that I had a traffic rank under 300,000.

Considering that there are nearly 50 million sites presently on the Internet, a site ranking under half a million is pretty good in my book. I had heard that sites using the Drupal content management system ranked well with the various search engines so I was pleased I chose Drupal for my site. All and all, those first few moments visiting Alexa were spent patting myself on the back for a job well done.

Then to my surprise I noticed that although I had typed in cmsreport.com, Alexa displayed uly.net. Uly.net was a domain I had never heard of before visiting Alexa.com. Worse, it appears that uly.net may have been benefiting from the traffic my site receives.

Traffic Rank for uly.net: 218,200

Where do people go on uly.net?

  • cmsreport.com - 98%

Now some of you might be asking yourself, why do I really care how my site is ranked? I'd like to say, it really doesn't matter to me either since I do run this site for "fun". But, I have an ego. I do get a sense of pride for finally having a site where people actually show up and visit. Put it this way, when you host sites that rank above 2 million you feel somewhat rewarded to finally have a site with only six digits in its rank. More importantly, there is benefit to understanding how traffic rankings from sites such as Alexa, Google, and Technorati are being utilized.