Entrecard screwing Alexa rank
Posted by multippt
Entrecard has certain ballooned its way to the top, now having even Problogger using Entrecard as well. Entrecard is a known way of getting quick traffic, but is it worth it? Sure, Entrecard’s going to give you traffic, but it’s known that Entrecarders rarely spend over a minute in a site, often choosing the option of drop-and-run. Then again, the traffic comes in a swarm, and guess what? Alexa rank will also rise, making your site look more heavily trafficked than it would have been.
Most Entrecarders have the Alexa toolbar installed. That’s because these users are webmasters, and webmasters often compete each other by traffic. Alexa is one of the most easiest and publicly places to view traffic stats for almost every site that have existed. In the hopes of boosting their Alexa rank (or viewing it conveniently for that matter), the users would install the Alexa toolbar. There you have it - a population with at least 60% of users with Alexa toolbar installed. That’s compared to the usual 10% of visitors with Alexa toolbar. Let’s not forget that on Alexa, Entrecard’s traffic increased by a hundredth-fold within a month. Not so sure about actual statistics though.
So, if you managed to tap some traffic from Entrecard, your Alexa rank would increase by a lot, even if as few as 20 to 50 (same/reciprocal/etc.) visitors come from Entrecard. Getting those visitors doesn’t require much work - all you need to do is to allocate about a few hours and start mass-clicking those “drop” links. Sooner or later, reciprocal dropping will occur, and presto… you have your Entrecard-driven traffic. Though, that traffic is like stumble - you’ll need to keep the ball rolling. On average, an Entrecard that is worth over 100 Entrecard credits would get a chance to appear in Alexa’s top 100,000. That’s nice… only if Entrecard traffic were not as bad as Digg traffic.
Of course, not forgetting the sites that are not able to participate in Entrecard. While Entrecard doesn’t actually restrict what sites can be submitted, it is generally blogs that are accepted by the community. In addition, due to the bulky design of the Entrecard, the Entrecard looks modestly unsightly on anything that is not a blog, but looks cool on blogs.
These non-blogging-related sites are disadvantaged, because they won’t be able to tap to Entrecard’s “potent” traffic. One by one, sites that were formally once in the top 100,000 are slowly being displaced from their position by blogs that had the luck of having owners that are willing to spend hours each day clicking on “drop”. The winners - Hyper-active Entrecarders, the losers - everyone else. These blogs need not have great content, just owners with a lot of spare time.
Lastly, let’s not forget that Alexa is fairly accurate, but inaccurate as well. Measuring only 10% of Internet traffic, you can’t really say it gives a fair picture of a site’s traffic, especially if a large chunk of Alexa users participates in Entrecard.
