I was wondering if it was a good idea to publish that one and finally came to the conclusion that I had to share this so everyone can understand how easy it is to fake the feedburner subscriber’s count and win any subscriber contest, anytime…It’s ridiculous. I’m posting this more so that everyone realize that it’s important to trust the person you are competing against or you could end up losing for stupid reasons.

I’m not posting this for people to do it, go out there and win contests or whatever: It’s not worth it because it is a FAKE subscriber count and won’t give you more readers, so don’t think about more traffic. I’m posting this because I’m sure you’ve asked yourself in the past: how the hell can that website have 100, 200 or 500 subscribers? How the hell did that website beat me in that contest? How the hell did that website increased its subscriber count by 100 overnight? Well folks, it’s easy as hell and that’s why the RSS subscribers count can really be BS.

You will also find some packages on DigitalPoint like “500 subscribers for 50$”. You can do shit alone, no need to pay. In fact, you don’t even want to do it alone because there really are NO ADVANTAGES and here’s why. (more…)

What a day. I’m running a website with one of my friend and the project is going very very well.  Within three months, we managed to get a steady 500+ uniques everyday and it’s going up everyday. We almost reached 1,000 uniques today and we are quite happy about the results we are getting for not too much work! We recently (2 days ago) switched to a hostgator reseller account at 25$ a month for this project because the database is so big (100,000+ entries), performance and server load is now an issue. So we switched without any major issues and the awesome tech support team at hostgator helped us resolve some minor problems, but today, it went completely crazy!

Google Crawl rate

If you run a website updated very often, you will notice a new option in Google webmaster tools: you will be offered to accelerate the Google Bot crawl speed for your site! This is the exact option:

We’ve detected that Googlebot is limiting the rate at which it crawls pages on your site to ensure it doesn’t use too much of your server’s resources. If your server can handle additional Googlebot traffic, we recommend that you choose Faster below.

Faster A faster crawl will enable us to crawl your site quickly, but may put more load on your server.

How tempting is that? Being indexed faster, the dream of every webmaster! With that fresh new reseller account I decided to turn the faster crawl rate on.

What a bad idea

What a bad idea that was to turn the faster crawl rate on. Note that the website we run is very very heavy on resources, so what happened to my website may not happen to your website if you enable the option. It took a couple of hours before the Google Bot decided to crawl my site at top speed, but when it did, boom! No more website!

I checked my statcounter account around 5pm to notice no new visitors came to the website within the last 30 minutes. That’s really unusual when you get 500-1000 uniques a day, so I typed my domain name to see if there was anything wrong. The result:

500 – Internal server error

The evil 500 internal error! The error that tells you something bad has happened, but we don’t tell you what it is and there’s no way to find out! So I emailed HostGator and received an answer within a couple of minutes. The problem was that all 25 allowed processes were used, so no more request could come in. The rep killed the processes and guess what? 5 minutes later, same thing! Eventually, it went back up and I made sure to check the normal crawl rate.

Be careful

So be careful if you check that option. Make sure your server can handle the evil Google bot!

I want to make a brief post about how Alexa ranking is inaccurate and might not be that good at getting a decent traffic estimate. I’m pretty sure everyone here is familiar with Alexa, but if you are new to SEO/Internet Marketing, you might wonder what I’m talking about so here’s a short description from Alexa’s website:

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, 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.

So you see, Alexa analyze the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and that’s their main source for traffic analysis.

Why isn’t accurate?

I run a couple of websites and I obviously like to compare how they are doing against each other. They aren’t in the same niche, but i still like to have a look at the ranking in Alexa vs the traffic I get. The past few weeks confirmed what I thought: Alexa is not accurate. For example, let’s take one of my older website which actually receive 50x more visitors than SEO Horror. Yes, you read correctly, 50 times more visitors daily than SEO Horror, so it’s interesting to have look at the rankings!

here’s how seohorror.com looks in Alexa:

Wow that’s not bad for a website about a month old. We have to look at the 1 week average because the 3 months average isn’t really any good for me now as seohorror.com has only been live for a month or so. I’ve had a couple of days in the top 100 and now it looks like I’m mostly between 100,000 and 150,000 on a constant basis. I’m OK with that.

Now, let’s see how my other website with 50 times more traffic than SEO Horror compare:

What’s that? I’m ranked 556,812 this week! I mean, 50 times more traffic and I’m poorly ranked. You see how inaccurate it is!

Why does it look so inaccurate?

The reason it looks so inaccurate between my two websites is because they aren’t in the same niche. The visitors at SEO Horror are SEO/Web marketers and there are good chances you guys use the Alexa toolbar. If 50% of my readers use the Alexa Toolbar, it will certainly boost my rankings because a normal percentage could be something like 0.5% of the readers. Now, on my other blog, which is definitely not aimed at techies, nobody uses the Alexa toolbar and nobody has a single clue what this toolbar is all about. So even if I receive 50 times more traffic, because nobody use the toolbar, I get a poor ranking.

Is it any good then?

It’s good to compare with websites within your niche. For example, if I compare my blog with another SEO blog, then it makes a little more sense when I look at the numbers. If I take a look at a cooking recipe website, then it doesn’t make any sense to compare. Alexa is mainly used as a traffic estimate and to put a price on how much you’ll sell advertisement on your website. If your Alexa ranking is good, you can usually sell advertisement a little more, especially if you’re in the top 100. So, the bottom line is that it’s so much easier to get a good ranking in Alexa with a tech/SEO/internet marketing blog!

So, you can continue to use Alexa to check your website progression, but it’s definitely not everything as you just saw. 50 times more traffic does not mean 50 times better ranking….In fact it can be the complete opposite as you just saw!

As bloggers, our main concern is to write good content so we can drive some traffic to our blog, but also build backlinks. One thing you’ve probably noticed is how hard it is to get backlinks from articles. Unless you have a good users base or write an extremely unique and valuable article, people won’t talk about your posts. We all know it’s impossible to write everyday the best post ever and nobody starts a blog with an instant 20,000 readers. So, what can you do?

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great WordPress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.

Today, ShoeMoney published an interesting post about a recent “mistake” he made. That mistake was to remove his feedburner subscriber count from his website. He was actually annoyed of people reacting to the ups and downs of his subscribers count, so he decided to remove it and it’s understandable. Now, it seems that since he removed that feedburner count, his stats have completly plateaued at something like 16,500 readers.

We’re all sheep

I actually never bothered putting the feedburner count on any of my website/blog, I thought it was pretty useless for people to know the amount of people subscribed to my feed. Now that ShoeMoney published this article and that I think about it a little more, I feel like I made a mistake too by not bothering. Why? We are all a little like sheep: we like what’s popular and want to be part of it. When someone visit your site and sees something like 100, 300 or 1000 subscribers, it’s easy to say: “Wow, that many subscribers? This website must be great, let’s subscribe too!”. Now I feel it’s important to take advantage of the sheep in all of us.

Be careful

While it’s great to show your subscriber count if you are over 100, I don’t think it’s a good idea below 50 subscribers or even 100 readers. Why? Well, you will get the opposite reaction: “Only 22 readers, it must be an average/crappy blog”.

It’s your call

I will definitely try to put the subscribers count in the next couple of days because I really think this can have a positive impact on a website’s credibility. In the end, it’s your call wether or not you should show the counter. Like I said, you have to figure out when it’s time to show it so it can have the desired effect and not the opposite. I think 100 is a good number, but it’s up to you!