freerepublic.com has to be cheating...

[George_S]

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=379&h=216&r=6m&y=r&u=freerepublic.com/focus/news/660464/posts&u=democraticunderground.com

How do they do it? I know their traffic can't be more than here let alone that much more.

[Zinfandel]

1. Well first of all why go there and give them that traffic?

[George_S]

2. I didn't go there. That's alexa.

[xultar]

4. No shit, with all of the posts we get that originated from there I wonder

sometimes what the deal-eo is.

Oh yeah, and think about all of the Drudge posts.

[George_S]

5. No, they are cheating, but how?

That's the question.

[enfield collector]

21. they're using diebold to audit their numbers.

[Kahutec]

31. Judging from the message

Half of the people browsing FR are from DU!

[NMDemDist2]

3. take a look at DailyKos or Bartcop too n/t

[OutsourceBush]

6. Not cheating..they don't delete all of their old threads like DU does

This gives them millions of pages indexed in the search engines. The more pages you have in the engines the more traffic you get, as you will come up under just about any topic. Also, Alexa ratings are not extremely reliable as far as rankings, but you can get a fair idea if a website is popular.

[George_S]

8. Thanks.

How do they get their pages in the engines?

One reason for asking about this is that the other night there were 4 articles on Google news about the "Kinsey" film, all right wing and all at the top of the news page at once because they were most recent.

So I wondered how they did that and Googled stuff.

[OutsourceBush]

14. What the hell has google news got to do with nazirepublic?

We were talking about the freeper scum web site and DU...not Google news.

[charlie]

16. Google News regularly spiders a list of sites

they've deemed "news" sites. FreeRepublic is one of them. DU is another.

[InvisibleBallots]

20. I often find FR articles from 96-99

about all sorts of subjects. Most of these are exceperts from other articles of course, along with generous amounts of freeper ranting. Honestly it makes one of the best political archives on the internet. DU should do this.

[Freddie Stubbs]

25. Old DU threads are not deleted, they are archived

[President Jesus]

7. simple. they encourage their users to install the Alexa toolbar

The Alexa toolbar is the ONLY way Alexa guages traffic. It's very similar to the Google toolbar, the difference being it logs every site you visit and communicates that back to a central server. They then extrapolate overall site traffic from this activity.

[George_S]

9. Thanks. That makes sense.

Maybe "cheating" was the wrong word then. They sure do something right though to make their message so dominant on the 'net.

Maybe some counter offensive tactics are in order.

[OutsourceBush]

15. Makes sense... but it is not correct

It is a common misconception that gets spread around. Freeper scum don't install that alexa crap on their computers any more than we do. Unless they accidently install it while they are surfing porn sites after church.

[President Jesus]

18. wrong. they often feature their Alexa ranking on their homepage

this causes their audience to click the graph and inevitably a percentage will go on to install the toolbar.

I've also seen Drudge feature an Alexa graph touting his success from time-to-time.

I have never seen this on a liberal site.

Good news, though. NO one cares. There is no one on the industry that gives two shits about Alexa rankings, as there is nothing accurate about them

[OutsourceBush]

19. They don't install that crap

think what you will, they just brag if Alexa shows them doing well. Then they show a graph. You can't make people install and keep Alexa. Even the freeper scum know better.

Most of Alexa ratings is done through scum-ware.

[ShaneGR]

23. Uhh, I would hardly call the Alexa toolbar "Scum-ware"

The poster is making a simple point, FreeRepublic puts up stats on the Alexa toolbar, its users like the fact that they are doing so well on Alexa. So their users go to Alexa (An independent site, and not started by Freepers) and download their toolbar. This increases their ratings.

I remember when DU was doing REALLY well on Alexa, and better than FreeRepublic. This wasn't more than a year ago in fact. DU'ers used to brag about it.

[OutsourceBush]

24. If I put on a rain coat and you put on a rain coat

and we both go outside and the sun is shining... I guess the reason the sun is shining is because we both put on raincoats.

The Alexa tool-bar is not upping anyones stats worth noticing. The freepers don't put on and keep on Alexa crap to boost their nazi web site any more than we do. There is no vast right wing toolbar conspiracy.

If you want to increase DU in Alexa or any other system, we need to get the Ops to leave all of the threads live and spider-able, so that we also have millions of web pages in the search engines.

I don't know all of the pages that the ops get rid of, but for sure they take down the archives every other day (or more) because of user load. When the archives go down, they can not be spidered and they will never be clicked on ever again if they are not spidered.

The key to more traffic is to have more pages in the search engines.

[President Jesus]

28. what you are saying is true for Google ranking, NOT Alexa ranking.

look, this will end this inane conversation once and for all:

http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/traffic_learn_more.html#traffic_rank

I'm assuming you are too lazy to even click that link, so here it is:

What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
--------------------

Now, the next time you want to challenge me, do us all a favor and know what you are talking about.

[OutsourceBush]

29. "millions of Alexa Toolbar users"

If you think a few dozen Nazi freepers with a toolbar are going to affect Alexa results in any meaningful way you are mistaken.

If you want to increase your position in a search engine or in Alexa you are not going to cheat it. You are going to have to do the work, and allow your pages to be indexed by the search engines.

Also, I have seen Alexa spyware on computers that have never installed your toolbar. How does that figure into your vast right wing toolbar conspiracy? Does Alexa tell you they put spyware on people's computers? I doubt you will find that on their public pages very easily. Alexa helped invent spyware/adware and as far as I can tell they still use it, without toolbars. So they don't even need toolbars to track you.

Have a nice day, and get a life.

[President Jesus]

30. Tard, no one said anything about conspiracy.

It only takes a handful of regular visitors who have the toolbar to jack up the rankings substantially.

Also, tard, no one is talking about search engines except you. The discussion is about Alexa's traffic rank and their methodology.

[ShaneGR]

22. Couldn't that conceivably increase their AD revenue?

Using Alexa ratings as a reason to jack up advertising costs?

[President Jesus]

27. there's no ad agency that uses Alexa to set rates (nt)

[Atman]

11. Also, Alexa does not work on Macs

An interesting post was made somewhere on DU yesterday...or maybe it was KOS...conservatives are considerably more likely to use a PC than a Mac. Therefore, some number of DU posters simply won't be counted because we can't even use the damned toolbar if we wanted to (which I don't).

[charlie]

13. Doesn't work on anything but IE either n/t

[President Jesus]

17. oh please. i've run a number of big web sites...

...many to a liberal audience. PC usage accounts for 90% of the traffic on all of these sites.

[bo44]

10. CHENEY free republic and the ass wipes flushed into it.

[Hippo_Tron]

12. They don't have jobs and live off of welfare and surf freerepublic all day

Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.

[progressoid]

26. Umm....Is this really a big issue? NT