I keep hearing about Alexa and how Alexa ranks websites. I checked it out today. My three most "successful" websites are ranked by Alexa. This blog is in the 5 million range (i.e. there are a bit over 5 million websites that get more traffic than this blog).
What I found interesting is that my law firm site, redlichlaw.com, at #1,282,824, outranks our traffic court directory site, town-court.com, at #1,641,944.
Alexa, which is owned by Amazon, explains its ranking process on a page called About the Alexa Traffic Rankings. This says that the traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users.
But town-court.com had a lot more traffic in the last three months than redlichlaw.com - roughly 50,000 unique users versus maybe 20,000. Even the previous three months the directory had more visitors than the law firm site.
This tells me there's clearly something wrong with Alexa's ranking system. My first guess is that there's a lot more Alexa toolbars on the west coast than on the east coast. My law firm site gets a lot of visitors looking for things related to California speeding tickets. The directory site doesn't have any courts in California -- but that's coming soon. :-)
Check out the Alexa Global Top 500 if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Update: I noticed another explanation - that Alexa toolbars are used more by people in the search engine optimization industry. That's from a post on Search Engine Journal.
Further update: After reading that post, I checked out compete.com. Their absolute numbers are off - my sites get a lot more traffic than we're getting credit for, but the trends looks accurate and the comparison between them also is about right.
Showing posts with label traffic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label traffic. Show all posts
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Our traffic court directory continues to grow
I was stunned just now. Our traffic court directory has been growing. We're over 700 courts now. Lawyers in local courts come up to me and compliment me on the site. Seems like it's helping a lot of people.
Traffic to the site has been growing, and I thought we would soon have a week with 3000 visitors. I checked our statistics today and we had nearly 4000 in the past 7 days. I checked it three different ways to be sure. Quite a burst. The police must have been writing a lot of tickets in the last couple of weeks.
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Brief update -- for the seven-day period from 1/6 to 1/12, we actually had almost 4200 visitors. Some were repeats, so the "absolute unique visitors" total was a bit over 3700. I think we were reindexed by Google so more of the courts in the database are showing up on searches. The 500th most visited page on the site, for Pawling Village Court in Dutchess County, had 3 unique visitors in that 7-day span, and the tie for last (1 unique visitor) was held by 130 pages. Over 190 pages on the site had 10 or more unique visitors. The top page (which shows the list of counties in New York State) had 740 unique visitors. This last statistic is quite interesting, as it means that 80% of the visitors came into the site without touching the main page. This is even more dramatic with my law firm site, where a bit over 10% of unique visitors go to the main page. Many websites focus on their main page and expect most traffic to come in that way.
Traffic to the site has been growing, and I thought we would soon have a week with 3000 visitors. I checked our statistics today and we had nearly 4000 in the past 7 days. I checked it three different ways to be sure. Quite a burst. The police must have been writing a lot of tickets in the last couple of weeks.
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Brief update -- for the seven-day period from 1/6 to 1/12, we actually had almost 4200 visitors. Some were repeats, so the "absolute unique visitors" total was a bit over 3700. I think we were reindexed by Google so more of the courts in the database are showing up on searches. The 500th most visited page on the site, for Pawling Village Court in Dutchess County, had 3 unique visitors in that 7-day span, and the tie for last (1 unique visitor) was held by 130 pages. Over 190 pages on the site had 10 or more unique visitors. The top page (which shows the list of counties in New York State) had 740 unique visitors. This last statistic is quite interesting, as it means that 80% of the visitors came into the site without touching the main page. This is even more dramatic with my law firm site, where a bit over 10% of unique visitors go to the main page. Many websites focus on their main page and expect most traffic to come in that way.
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