Reveal Your Traffic Details in Alexa

I’ve got an awful feeling this tip is going to turn out to be one of those “Durr” moments, my almost-teenage son would know all about and think I was a total dolt for not. Anyway, as most bloggers know www.alexa.com lets you follow the web surfing of users of the Alexa Toolbar. There are an awful lot of people using their toolbar in one form or another so the graphs it produces are a relatively good indication of search traffic heading in and out of a website.

Unfortunately, if you are not in the top 100,000 sites it is difficult, if not impossible to display a chart of your site’s ups and downs. However, there is a very simple way to show your chart alongside other similar sites and so reveal that which is hidden. All you need to do is go to the Alexa homepage and replace the site names being compared by default on that page with your own site and another that you suspect has similar traffic. So, try sciencetext.com and technology news site blahblahtech.com, for instance.

Works instantaneosly. But, what if you want to look at traffic for a short than the default time period? Well drop down, and you get the “Not in top 100,000″ label on the chart and no data. Bah! So, what now? Well, add another site that has a bit more traffic, perhaps JohnTP.com or something similar, and try the 7-day chart again! Woohoo! There we three all are.

Sadly, JohnTP’s site seems to outrank Sciencetext and BlahBlahTech by a significant figure. But, hopefully that will all change very soon as our evil plans for domination of the blogosphere move into phase II…bruaah…haaah…haah…haaaaaaaah.