Self-promotion, redux
A few months ago I wrote about how I’d seen a dizzying rise in the Alexa ranking of this site (it’s now around 440,000th, putting me in the top half-million sites on the internet) simply by installing the Alexa plug-in for Firefox and thereby reporting my own daily web browsing for Alexa’s statistics.
In our various explorations of site promotion tools (have I mentioned that I work on this website?) we discovered another website ranking company, Compete, which uses both self-reported traffic from browser plug-ins (a la Alexa) along with ISP logs and other data closer to the backbone to arrive at another ranking number. Naturally, we want to be ranked there as well (many reports average the two rankings), so we want to report our daily traffic to them.
To do this, rather than install the Compete plug-in right next to the Alexa one, I replaced the Alexa plug-in with one from quirk.biz. This reports data to both Alexa and Compete, and also shows sites’ rankings on both services (plus their Google PageRank, an added extra.) Judging from what I read on Compete.com, it will take a while for them to accumulate enough data to rank some sites (this one, for example, is still unranked) but the more people who visit with this plug-in or Compete’s own, the sooner (and higher) it will be ranked.
![[Swinging off a dragger, Cundy's Harbor, Maine, July 4th, 2003]](/images/cundys_harbor.jpg)