It’s the end of the year and I’m looking back and wrapping up a few things. One of my new tools for doing so is Compete a search engine and traffic ranking website that does a much more accurate job, from what I can tell, of reflecting a site’s traffic flow than does Alexa.
My main point of comparison between Alexa and Compete comes from my three sites, ProHipHop, Hip Hop Press and netweed, whose comparative Alexa rankings do not reflect their comparative traffic and whose comparative ups and downs don’t appear accurately in Alexa.
However, Compete’s chart of the three is closer to the truth, especially for ProHipHop and Hip Hop Press, though netweed is actually doing a bit less rather than a bit more traffic. On the other hand, the drops and spikes all happen in the right place at the right time.
What you see in the chart is the result of a weird downgrade of ProHipHop and netweed by Google starting in December 2005 that did not affect their Google PR but did radically affect their standings in search engine results. Now that we’re back in Google’s good graces, ProHipHop’s higher than ever and netweed’s almost back, as long as Google’s fragile love holds good.
So not an A but at least a B for Compete compared to Alexa’s C, at best, in lieu of other readily available options.
What Compete also helped me figure out is that blogging for XXL might be the worst thing that can happen to a formerly independent blogger’s blog.
An especially startling shift occurred when Byron Crawford began blogging for XXL back in March as seen on this Compete comparison chart. First Byron gets a nice spike as XXL’s redesign goes live followed by a drop ultimately resulting in what looks like an overall decline from pre-XXL levels, though he could now be on the rebound. Crawford’s dramatic rise and fall is more clearly visible when looking at his site alone.
Is Byron overworked and out of ideas? A quick glance at recent posts reveals a lot of boring stuff. Maybe he’s just waiting to come back bigger and badder than ever in 2007. In fact, he kind of has to, don’t you think?
In related news, Compete has MTV taking a nosedive.
Whoa, guess that redesign was the kiss of death!
Note: Parts of this post inspired by Michael Miraflor on Compete and Langston Sessoms on MTV at the Hip Hop and Advertising discussion group.
