Not the most brilliant of discoveries, but a connection certain people like to deny exists. Traffic exchanges destroy your Alexa rank. There is no point in arguing the value of an Alexa rank, much like Google’s page rank, it has no value in its own. However, certain advertising companies use it to rank sites. If you do paid posts or sell ads through an agency, then ranking well in Alexa helps. I’d rather get $60 a post than $5. Look what happened to turnipofpower.com after the infamous asshat incident. I went from an average of 450 readers a day down to 300 readers a day. The loss of those 150 toolbar droppers turned out to be a huge positive.
Look at another former member of Entrecard, Lyndi from Nice2All.com. She stopped using that traffic exchange a few days earlier than I did.
The question is why? My bounce rates, though improved, are still relatively high. My two current sources of traffic, Stumble Upon traffic and Search Engines, have similarly high bounce rates. Thus the theory that Alexa penalizes high bounce rates is out. Stumble traffic is also social traffic, so you can’t say Alexa hates social traffic. Conspiracy theories about Spottt vs Entrecard? Wishful thinking, but not likely.
The answer must be the exchange of pageviews. Say 100 people all have the Alexa toolbar. If those 100 toolbar users load the same sites routinely, that would be detected. It’s the reciprocal nature of the traffic exchange that is detected and penalized. Google does something similar with pageranks. If I link to a site, and that site links back to me, then the effect of those links is weaker than a one way link would be.
This is why my own social network, CMF ADS won’t be repeating this critical error. The only benefit of visiting another member’s site is the pleasure gained from reading it. Sure, when we see something we like we advertise there, Stumble the post, Digg, Mixx, Buzz, or whatever social media seems appropriate. But traffic exchange? Never.
I only get 15 to 20 visitors from EC a day, it will be interesting to see what happens with my Alexa when I take Entrecard off my site.
I have recently received a warning from EntreCard because I took the widget off of one of my sites. I would have removed the website from EntreCard, but their system doesn’t have a feature like that (???)
Anyway, since I’ve received the warning, I’ve removed the widget from my sites. It’s not been long enough to have a measurable change, but I know that EntreCard traffic is bad for people who have Google AdSense since many of these people leave immediately after clicking the EC widget and Google often regards activity such as this as bad traffic.
My main problem with EntreCard is that the admin appears to be kind of immature (a comment that I will say even knowing that he will probably removed my EC account.) I mean, first of all we both know he reads your blog as if you were a sworn enemy even though your comment is true.
I mean, who creates a forum where people are allowed to tear each other up and hurt each others’ feelings and removes it only after someone says something about the site. I don’t want to be a part of a fascist “community” like that. He’s killing EntreCard, it was fun at first and now it’s a spam fest.
Holy crap, you’re right! I stopped dropping last week due to the 4,000th virus I picked up from them. Then I looked at my Alexa. While it’s not great, it’s improved! That’s a surprise to me!
I’ll keep an eye out and see how it goes after some time has gone by…
Mommie
http://www.mommieshome.net
http://www.momscashsite.com
I am not really into rankings and the like, maybe because I do not really understand how they work (there could be a new years resolution hidden in here). All I know is that leaving Entrecard was one of the better things I did in 2008. This departure gave me more time to spend on other more productive things on my blog. It is these things that have led to an improvement in my blog’s rankings.
People need to wake up and learn that dropping isn’t blogging and installing a widget will not replace hard work.
In addition to Entrecard, I’ve removed MyBlogLog (which drove ZERO traffic) and BlogCatalog widgets.
I did add the new Google Friends widget, but that is more of an experiment at this point.
I saw a surge in Alexa when I stopped dropping too. Visitors went down, ranking went up. Thanks for explaining why…
I’m not dropping much anymore, and am preparing to take the widget off my site. It just isn’t worth keeping it up there.
Proof is in the pudding. I added a new blog, one which has been in existence for a month and I suddenly received 8 or so requests for advertising from EC. No one bothered to even look at the site.
My old blog, and my baby, received over 15,000+ unique page views in December. Mostly seasonal, but the less often I post, the more traffic I get. The BIGGEST key- key words. Use them in your title, your post and if you use WordPress, I highly recommend the All-in-One SEO plugin. Go back through old posts and add keywords with the plugin. This is how I’ve been #1 on Google for various search terms and phrases. It’s all about content people- not advertising.
The traffic boost makes new bloggers think Entrecard gave them a low Alexa rank. When they would have had that same rank if they had just waited 3 months. Every blog starts out ranked 8 million, and then comes down to 700k after 3 months even if you never post.
Interesting observation.. it makes me think again to quit Entrecard now
I’ve always been very skeptical about most of these new ideas of traffic exchange and have never used them on my blog. I know they not different from the old forms of traffic exchanges – those who use them are only looking for a way to gather points. Most times they produce the worst form of bounced traffic.
In one of my recent posts I mentioned how my alexa rank dropped from 6,712,252 to 878,621 in 3 weeks – http://cli.gs/DZ41Zt simply by concentrating on good content and seo strategies. On the long run this pays better.
Just goes to show, real traffic does still count.
The only thing that I saw that was good from my experience with Entrecard was meeting are few good bloggers who became friends with.
Biggest problem was the drop rate and many times I have seen where it increases up to 15% to 20% on Entrecard.
When I quit Entrecard, it was a very good move and my traffic has been increasing monthly.
This is all very interesting. I would be interested in hearing additional evidence to the effect Entrecard has on overall traffic, especially from search engines.
here are two other posts with similar claims:
http://lissowerbutts.com/free-backlinks-but-dont-use-entrecard/
http://technologyinsanity.com/seo/does-entrecard-kill-search-engine-traffic/
Does anyone have specific evidence like this or other posts they can point me to.
thank you