Two weeks ago, I joined into a viral tags boosting experiment. Essentially, it was a way to boost your Technorati authority and ranking, and potentially also your Google page rank. At the time my Technorati authority was somewhere around 170. Much of that was because of being part of the Progressive Bloggers Alliance, which has mostly fallen apart, other than linking to one another.

This latest experiment boosted my Technorati authority up to around 350. Essentially, this is a way of looking at how many people are linking into the site. However, that doesn’t really have that big an effect. What really matters is how many people read your site, or, depending on the advertising system you are working with, click on links in your site to external sites. During the last two weeks, traffic has actually decreased 15 to 20%.

There are a lot of ways that you can measure traffic. My site uses Drupal the access log shows an average of 4000 hits a day from an average of 1000 different IP addresses a day. However, I am sure that includes many spambots, various sites reading my RSS feeds and who knows what all else.

One site that many people use to track traffic is Alexa. Alexa gathers data from many sources, including an addon to Internet Explorer. I use that addon which helps boost my rating there. Another way is to link to your site using Alexa redirection, e.g. http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.orient-lodge.com. I don’t like the second approach. I want people to be finding my site in searches and not have it hidden in some redirection.

So, by simply using the tool bar, Orient Lodge is ranked fairly highly on Alexa. As a matter of fact, it is ranked higher than Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign sites.

I mentioned this to my daughter who said it made her feel like Polgara in David Edding’s Belgarath the Sorcerer when she realized that her father was a real sorcerer and not just some slacker magician.

So, by boosting my Alexa ratings, I’ve at least polished my image with one of my daughters and a few political geeks I know, but Alexa rankings are perhaps not all that meaningful. In Alexa, Obama outranks DailyKos and Mike Gravel outranks Dennis Kucinich.

Another ranking system is Compete. On that, I’m ranking at the bottom of the heap. They use a toolbar to gather traffic information. They claim to ‘use rigorous statistics to make sure our estimates balance demographic and connection factors that match the entire U.S. Internet population’. This may work well for high volume sites, but I wonder how much it applies to the long tail. Right now, their site is showing data from 5/2006 to 5/2007. It was before I added the toolbar, so it will be interesting to see how things change when they incorporate June data. The problem is that there are so many tool bars to kick around, and I’ll probably drop some of them shortly.

There is also Quantcast. They collect data through “affiliations with partners, who include advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks.” One of the things they do is use a pixel for people to add into their sites. I’ve added it into Orient Lodge and currently they are claiming I get around 2000 unique monthly visitors, with around 1300 coming from the United States. According to the Search Status toolbar, Compete thinks I’m getting 1400 visitors, but it doesn’t say from where or over what timeframe.

By looking at the Presidential campaign websites, as well as various progressive blogs, Compete and Quantcast appear to be very closely correlated. I don’t know if they are sharing data in any way.

A long time ago, I played with SiteMeter, but I found their numbers particularly unreliable and I had people complaining about slowness of my site when I used SiteMeter. I kicked around giving them another try, but I’m not hearing a lot of good stuff about SiteMeter recently, so I think I’ll pass.

Where does this leave me with my thoughts on various ranking tools? Well, I think what is much more important is the quality of what gets written and a lot of these tools don’t seem to really make that much difference. Sure, you can try to game the system, but as Janis Ian reminds us,

those who win the game
Lose the love they sought to gain
In debitures of quality and dubious integrity