Why Alexa is a wrong factor for sponsored reviews
14. Jul, 2007 
3 Comments
If we want to know how many incoming links point to the site, we check the PageRank, and if we want to roughly estimate the site’s traffic, we go and look at Alexa chart. Most advertisers, especially those who sponsor blog reviews, judge sites by Alexa Ranking, assuming that seeking a certain Alexa rank would guarantee their product’s exposure to a certain traffic level. WRONG!
You can go to PayPerPost.com, and find blogs with, let’s say, maximum Alexa rank of 150,000 (which is relatively not bad), who’d willingly blog about your product. You can find many blogs who would (inexpensively) blog about your site with even a lower (better) rank, and you’ll believe you got an excellent deal here. One thing you did not take into though, is that Alexa rank is assigned to the domain name, not single page or directory inside the domain (unlike Google RageRank, that works on a park-per-page basis).
Let me give you an example. Say I offer a very cheap sponsored review on loreleiweb.com/blog – a blog that has no PR, yet a good Alexa rank of 133,194. You can count upon impressive traffic, and buy a review there; 5$ for instance would be a nice deal, right? However, in this very case, I can assure you that no one would even get to see your review and links, as it’s “just” a blog installed for the purpose for testing WP themes, and the Alexa traffic it displays, in fact belongs to the main site – loreleiweb.com and the bound to it forum, which gather together over 4k-5k visitors a day. Yes, the domain has traffic, but not the blog which misleadingly show the traffic details based on Alexa Rank.
This is a factor you should definitely consider when buying sponsored reviews from bloggers, as you never know what other sites they are running on the same domain (in folders, directories or sub domains). I figured this out when I decided to purchase a few reviews for this blog myself, and thought that PR is not as important as exposure, so I thought I’d rather pay for traffic. Traffic details I cannot get, and I can only but rely on Alexa chart. However, after everything I said above, I concluded that paying for a PR6 blog review is more “secure”. If the site has so many incoming links, sure thing someone, sometimes, drops by, right?
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