One of the imperfect metrics that webmasters and would be advertisers use (outside of raw Google Analytics data) and Google PageRank is the Alexa rating of a site.  For a listing of the top sites in the world you can go here: Alexa Ratings

Alexa.com has made a business out of providing metrics to the marketplace on various sites.  Alexa’s data is aggregated from several sources, one of which is (I believe) the alexa toolbar.

The Alexa ranking of a site, is the ranking of a site’s popularity among all web surfers.

As you can see from the above link, Google.com is #1 (duh)

What’s kind of cool, is that you can individual searches for sites like corporateraiter.com on the site by doing a search.  For CorporateRaiter’s alexa.com rank you can go here CorporateRaiter Alexa Rank

Madness!

According to alexa.com corporate raiter is among the top 300k sites WORLDWIDE.  And, ranked 82,977 in the US.

C’mon.

There have to be at least 83,000 porn sites that are more popular than Corporate Raiter.

In fact, I have some blogs on other topics that get more traffic that haven’t even broken the top 1MM on Alexa’s rating scale.  While I’m not complaining, I wanted to point this out since I mentioned it as one of the criteria that I would be tracking as part of my dofollow experiment.

On that measure I would have to say that the dofollow experiment was a smashing success.

As far as PageRank goes (a criminally lagging indicator) I had much better results on some subpages of mine using another technique.  I’m going to do some more experimenting to see if I can narrow down the specific reason that this “other” technique had so much success in getting pagerank *quickly*.  One of my posts actually has a pagerank of 4, and another has a pagerank of 3.

Let me know what you think about the alexa algorithm and your experiences with it?

Is Alexa worthwhile at all, or just a tool to dupe unsuspecting newbs in the Internet space?

Sound off.  Leave a comment.  It’s dofollow.

The “Prostitute Principle” (not to be confused with the prostitute principal — har har har) is a phenomenon that many consultants are probably familiar with.

It refers to the difficulty of charging services after they have already been rendered.

Call girls, of course, have found a way to deal with this problem — and that is to always get paid up front.

Think about this for a minute: if you tell me that you desperately want to double the size of your business, and i tell you that I can help you — for a cost — as long as that cost is ‘reasonably’ less than they perceived benefit you receive by doubling your business you are probably interested.

Now, if the grand sum of my work is 15 minutes of tweaking your site, many people will begrudge the consultant his fair share of the proceeds.

Even funnier, is that almost no one will admit that they would feel this way. However, it’s part of human nature that they don’t see the 10 years of experience that gave someone the knowledge to know WHAT to tweak. They only see the 10 minutes of work and think: “gosh, someone else could have done that just as easily and charged a LOT less”. Nevermind, that 9 out of 10 professionals wouldn’t have known what to do and would have worked for months with less to show in results.

The mark of the true professional is someone who can cut through the clutter, simplify, and not be focused on trying to make simple concepts complicated. Unfortunately, these are also the same behaviours that will make you susceptible to the prostitute principle.

Oh, but wait, I know….all my readers are more evolved and would never do that, right?

Sound off. Leave a comment. It’s a follow link for your site after all.