Replies

_Jim wrote:

Isn't that traffic ranking a bit deceiving/a bit deceptive?

Just asking, but I seem to remember a discussion on this before.

acorn.org has one main entry point whereas FR page 'hits' look to be via several different entry points so acorn.org would show many more main page hits by Alexa ...

Alexa isn’t perfect by any means. It’s a little more like Neilsen ratings. With a key difference that the participants self select by installing the Alexa toolbar.

But the toolbar isn’t the only data source they use. They do get other information.

For the specific item you mention, multiple entry points, so long as all entry points for a site are the same primary domain (freerepublic.com would include www.freerepublic.com or webmail.freerepublic.com or anythingelse.freerepublic.com), those all count toward the same primary domain. If you enter through a different primary domain, that would count someplace else.

Here’s a link with a more detailed explanation of Alexa rankings: "How are Alexa's traffic rankings determined?”

There are other web sites that do traffic estimations as well. Another that I sometimes refer to is http://www.trafficestimate.com/. That one attempts to (gu)estimate page hits per day. It actually uses Alexa data along with other data to generate the estimate. For most sites that I have access to the actual logs on, that estimator is usually somewhere within an order of magnitude (factor of ten) of correct.

For a look at all the Alexa data on the 5 listed domains, click this link: Alexa data for acorn.org, glennbeckrape....com, glennbeck.com, freerepublic.com and whitehouse.gov.

There are tabs above the graph to switch views between "Traffic Rank," "Reach," "Page views," and other statistics. Also, at the bottom of the graph, you can select the time frame for the graph, from the last 7 days all the way out to 2 years.

Except for whitehouse.gov, Freerepublic.com is way above the others. And actually, Freerepublic.com is typically above the whitehouse site, but in the past few days, whitehouse.gov has had a lot of traffic and interest. People are suddenly paying more attention to the official white house web site. Traffic at Freerepublic.com is much more steady. Whitehouse.gov has periodic spikes that seem to correspond to Pres__ential involvement in major legislative issues. There was another big peak back in March, around the time of the Omnibus(t) budget bill, and a huge spike back in January around inauguration time. Freerepublic built up to a peak during the 2008 presidential primaries, and then fell off until the conventions, when it built steadily to another peak around election day, 2008.

Also of note, up until the end of August, Acorn got far more traffic from searches than the others. Then, searhes going to acorn dropped off a cliff.

People are more likely to have the others in their bookmarks, or to go directly to those domains from other ways, rather than searching for something that takes them to freerepublic.com.

greedo wrote:

I was trying to figure out why someone who is not an acorn employee would copy tags from a low traffic site like acorn instead of just using the one at Glenn

First, the person who did this smear site on Beck isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. It is entirely possible that they work for ACORN. I don't completely rule that out.

Actually, it’s quite possible the “Michelle” referred to in today’s HTML comments might work for the people who develop and maintain the ACORN site (which may or may not be actual ACORN employees). And this person is helping “Kelly” develop the Beck smear site.

Reality is that very few search engines today even pay attention to the “keywords” meta tag. And the ones that do pay attention won’t rank you much for a keyword that doesn’t actually appear in the visible text of the page. So this trick won’t even fool most search engines (certainly not Google) and divert traffic to their site. Further, the “description” meta tag is far more important in today’s search engine environment, but the “developer” of the Beck smear site doesn’t have one of those tags at all.

But another explanation is that these people grabbed code from whatever page they have in their bookmarks, or a site that they liked for some reason. Now, given the traffic stats, not many people visit the ACORN site, so the population we’re talking about is pretty small, but it’s also the same pool of potential “developers” for the smear site.

Comparing the DNS whois info for acorn.org to the DNS whois info for gb1990.com, I doubt that the same people set these sites up.

On the other hand, it might fit in with ACORN's documented organizational structure shell game.

In short, the “keywords” meta tag on the Beck smear site really doesn’t prove much. However, the lack of a “description” meta tag on that site, to me at least, indicates that the primary developer(s) of the ACORN site were not directly involved in the Beck smear site. I think that those developers would have put a meaningful description tag on that Beck site if they were involved with it.