Free advertising

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
david a
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Free advertising

Post by david a »

Hi

I recieved a text message telling me i could advertise my property for free, I looked at the site and it looks ok but was wondering if anyone else has recieved anything like this. the site is called eureka247.com I am probably going to advertise here and thought it might be of interest to others.

David
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TravelPixel
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Post by TravelPixel »

fair enough for free. Their claim to show your advert to millions is a blag, there is very little traffic going to this site according to alexa, although it looks pretty new. Worth a go perhaps.

Dave :D
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mpprh
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Post by mpprh »

Hi

just worth saying that Alexa, today owned by Amazon, is of little value to most of us.

It is based on Alexa tool bar information, google and open directory results. It is heavily influenced by the top1000 web sites.

Peter
The Languedoc Page
www.the-languedoc-page.com
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BungleBob
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Interpreting Alexa

Post by BungleBob »

Alexa gather data from those who have the toolbar installed and therefore the data is based on only a subset of web users. It's a great toolbar, here's a general rule of thumb we use from the ranking score:

< 20,000 - very important website, high traffic.
< 100,000 - pretty important, good traffic levels.
100,000 - 500,000 - moderate traffic (somebody is making a good effort with the site)
>500,000 - not a very important site, very limited audience
1,000,000+ or no data - probably a brand new website or one that has virtually no importance.

If you have your own site and are surprised by the results, firstly install the toolbar - this means you count as "traffic".

Regardless of whether this is a fair measure or not, most serious webmasters will judge your site based on a combination of Google PageRank and Alexa ranking. This in turn affects the link exchange/partnership deals you can do to increase rankings and bring traffic to your website. Therefore (like it or not!) Alexa is important.

Hope this helps!
Richard Speigal, Editor, España Breaks
petehols
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Post by petehols »

Hi Bunglebot

As most serious webmasters will tell you alexa is of very little importance at all. It only registers users that have the alsxa toolbar installed. If any webmaster wanted to they could easily manipulate the rankings on alexa. Secondly the google pr is of little or no importance either. This tool was used in the past and does not affect any listings in the SERPS. The only thing of any real importance is the quality of the sites linking to your own. If you concentrate on this and providing good quality for your customers that is what will push your listings to the top of the pile.

Pete
for worldwide holidays try www.lastminutevillaholiday.co.uk
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TravelPixel
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Post by TravelPixel »

I wouldnt say Alexa is of very little importance at all. Its a useful piece of information from a cross section of internet users. It is by no means a definitive way to judge traffic to your site but is a useful tool in the absense of anything better.

Id like to know how you think the alexa ranking can be manipulated?

Dave :D
petehols
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Post by petehols »

Hi Travelpixel

All you would have to do to manipulate the alexa rankings would be to install the toolbar and keep visiting your site all day everyday. Everytime that alexa sees your site being visited it improves the ratings of your website. It is an easy way to manipulate your alexa ratings. That is why most webmasters no longer pay much attention to that tool.

Pete
for worldwide holidays try www.lastminutevillaholiday.co.uk
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TravelPixel
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Post by TravelPixel »

Pete,

It doesnt work like that. You need different IP's. Alexa would be a joke if it worked the way I think you are suggesting? One user hitting the site all day with one toolbar will not affect it - apart from being counted as 1 visitor - surely thats obvious? Is that what you mean?

If you had several colleagues with toolbars installed I suppose you could manipulate it that way but I doubt that is done unless you are really desperate to boost the rankings! The ranking is also based on page views per user and country of origin to provide the reach.

Again, not the be all and end all, but valuable.

D :D
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marcus
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Post by marcus »

cheznous.com: Alexa ranking 112,000
southofthedordogne.com: Alexa 65,000 (my site) :D

Nice to know, but if it is accurate I would cancel your ads with cheznous pretty soon
kevincohr
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Post by kevincohr »

Regarding Alexa, my view is that it can be a useful way to screen sites that are definitely LOW traffic.

Although it may be possible to artificially boost rankings by having lots of your relatives, friends, colleagues install the toolbar, if a site has a high ( i.e.) bad Alexa ranking, then you can be sure that it's a low traffic site.

Another tool that provides visitor numbers is trafficestimate.com : it provides an estimate of the number of visitors to your site in the last 30 days. I'm not sure how it calculates ( I've mailed them but got no reply), but I assume it also uses some statistical sampling for it's estimation.

Regards,

Kevin
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TravelPixel
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Post by TravelPixel »

interesting tool that trafficestimator - havent come across that before.

Thanks Kevin

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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

It's not true to say that Alexa ignores repeated visits from the same IP: it should, but it doesn't. Out of curiosity, I installed the toolbar last year and happened to be looking a lot at a site that I was developing, one that wasn't indexed. Net effect: ranking went from 4 million down to about 400 thousand over the course of a few weeks. So, if you happen to be developing a site or even just looking at your own site, then your Alexa rank will improve quite dramatically.

Also, the mix of people who have it installed is far from representative from what I've seen. Apparently it is much more common to have it installed by folk that run self-catering than it is by people who do B&B for instance. Net effect: any self-catering site will have a higher ranking than one that runs just B&B.

Marcus naturally benefits from the heap of visitors for the YHM forum too. Does that mean that his southofthedordogne is "more important" than his unranked northofthedordogne? Well, I guess it is if you're interested specifically in the forum, but otherwise not really.

Of course, the other problem is that presumably google's toolbar is used in part of their pagerank equation.


Arnold
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Big Sis..
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Post by Big Sis.. »

I noticed the posting about free advertising from a Guest?

This seems a bit strange

Would this be thought of as a form of scamming??
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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

I'd say so. Having said that, you do seem to be able to run a 9 month ad and not pay anything for it.

Best plan is to wait 'til you are edging into your peak booking season and then give it a go. Just don't renew it if they don't bring in any bookings.

I was talking to another listings site owner about such things and apparently the renewal rate from free trial periods is under 5% so I guess most folk are just as mercenary as I am about free trials :)


Arnold
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vrooje
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Post by vrooje »

Yes that was spam, the user was registered but was then deleted by an admin. Sometimes we forget to also remove the post(s). :)
Brooke
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