OnlineTechJournal

As some of you might knew that on April 16, 2008 Alexa made an announcement that shocked many bloggers because of significant drops of their blog rank. Yeah, Alexa has changed the algorithm they use to calculate the Traffic Rank. Etienne Teo on his post listed some of popular blogs that are affected significantly after that change :

• Problogger - 3797 to 12917
• Shoemoney - 4937 to 19818
• Johnchow - 5679 to 17088
• Dailyblogtips - 14478 to 68649
• CourtneyTuttle - 21019 to 67687
• Yaro Starak - 19581 to 49443
• Andy Beard - 23961 to 90210
• Vandelay Design - 28119 to 130560
• Ian Fernando - 62915 to 146486
• Google Lady - 68757 to 107138
  

Alexa on their Blog mentioned that there are 3 reasons behind the change :

More Sources -- Alexa ranking are now based on more sources of data to give a better indicator of website popularity

Improved Methodology -- We are normalizing the traffic from our global panel to provide consistently accurate ranking for all countries.

Better Rankings -- The rankings are now an event better indication of website popularity due to new and improved algorithms.

For few weeks there was no update for the Alexa Rank and people start questioning what happen to Alexa Rank? But today we got the answer. The Alexa Traffic Rank is updated for the first time since the algorithm change.

See how is the update affected to the blogs i mentioned above :

• Problogger - 3797 to 12917 now 14176
• Shoemoney - 4937 to 19818 now 22624
• Johnchow - 5679 to 17088 now 15979
• Dailyblogtips - 14478 to 68649 now 63349
• CourtneyTuttle - 21019 to 67687 now 71989
• Yaro Starak - 19581 to 49443 now 50256
• Andy Beard - 23961 to 90210 now 104631
• Vandelay Design - 28119 to 130560 now 115479
• Ian Fernando - 62915 to 146486 now 144020
• Google Lady - 68757 to 107138 now 100555
  

See?? That it's not easy to improve the Alexa Traffic Rank. What about the OnlineTechJournal?Just few days before the change OnlineTechJournal had reached 600.000 in Alexa Traffic Rank. But after the change it was dropped to 803.204. But today from the first update OnlineTechJournal Alexa rank is improved and managed to reach 769903, not bad.

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Officially i started this blog on November 6, 2007. Yesterday it's been 6 months i running this blog. During this period i have changed my blog template for 7 times and this Langit template i'm using is the 7th. There are many reasons why i changed my templates such as features, ease of use, appearances or just want to have a fresh look. This is actually not a good practice and what i found is it's always painful when changing your blog templates since you have to re-work everything you've done like putting scripts for recent posts, tag clouds, etc. I really hope i'm going to use this current template for long time unless i found another interesting templates.

Here are few blogger templates i used before on this blog. If you found it's interesting you can use it or just give a try.

Blog Oh Blog

Glossy Blue



Typo XP



Ilacrimo



Dilectio



Ads Theme



Langit

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Generally Link Popularity is the total number of websites that link to your site. Sometimes we call it website rank, traffic rank or whatever that show how popular is your website or blog comparing to others. This is become important because good link popularity can dramatically increase traffic to your blog. And also knowing the link popularity of a blog is a very simple way to see how good they are.

Basically there are 4 Link Popularity standards that are commonly used :

Google PageRank

Google describe PageRank :

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

The numbers rank from 0 to 10. On the last PageRank update OnlineTechJournal PR has been decreased to PR2 from PR3 previously.

Yahoo! Search InLinks

The "InLinks" is a number of web pages pointing to your site. It's based on Yahoo! search. Based on Yahoo! Search InLinks currently there are 401 web pages pointing to OnlineTechJournal.

MSN

This is somehow not popular in measuring blog popularity but similar to Yahoo! Search InLinks, this data shows the number of web pages pointing to your site based on MSN search. Currently there are 11 web pages are pointing to OnlineTechJournal

Alexa Traffic Rank

Alexa Traffic Rank is a very famous tool used to rank web site traffic. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. In Alexa, the lower the rank you have is the better.

There are a huge websites that provide online service to check Link Popularity. Some of them are also provide a widget script so you can put it on your blog. Below are some recommended Link Popularity checkers :

• http://www.prchecker.info (Google PageRank - widget is available)
• http://www.prsitecheck.com (Google PageRank - widget is available)
• http://www.rankwidget.com (Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Yahoo! Search InLinks - widget is available)
• http://www.alexa.com (Alexa Traffic Rank - widget is available)
• http://www.mypagerank.net (Google PageRank, Yahoo! Search InLinks, MSN, Alexa - widget is available for Google Page Rank)
• http://www.mypagerank.info (Google PageRank, Yahoo! Search InLinks, MSN, Alexa - widget is not available)

If you know any websites provide the same tool please share it here.

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If you look at the categories section on this blog, you will find that it uses the Tag Cloud style. I prefer to use this tag cloud instead of the traditional Blogger categories style to give a different look for my blog. And also it will safe space on my blog. Imagine if you have lots of categories, it will take a lot of space on your blog.

I have searched for the tag cloud widget on the internet but most of them are complicated and not easy to implement. The one that i use on this blog is one of the most simple widget so far. I got this widget from Compender blog. You only need a few steps to install the widget. Here we go!

• Download the widget code here
• Login to your Blogger account. From your blog dashboard go to your blog layo
• Go to the "Edit HTML" tab and click "Expand Widget Templates". Search for the "Label" page element you just added. Normally it will look like this :
  

• Replace the default "Label" widget code starting from the start to the end as below, with the code you downloaded on the first step.

• Save your template

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What is Site Meter?

From Site Meter : Site Meter is a free, fast, and easy way to add a web counter to your web page. Not only can it display the number of visitors to your web site, it also keeps statistics on the number of visits each hour and every day. It also provides detailed information about these visitors. These statistics are provided in real time so they are always up-to-date.

If you find the logo above on a blog or website, it means the blog use Site Meter as one of the tools to track the blog statistics.

Few times ago curiously i clicked on the Site Meter logo on some of popular blogs. I was wonder that some of them shown the detailed statistics of the blog which means that the data is shared to the public. Yes it is. By default the data is shared to the public.

The question is, do you really have to share your Site Meter statistics? I have a few opinion about this :

• If your blog is popular and you have a very good statistic, it's not a problem to share. But if not, that's not a good idea. Your readers will know that and they will feel that they just visit an unknown blog where no body visit it. So you have to be careful on this.
• Sharing your statistic is a good when you are offering advertisers to advertise on your blog so they can see that the statitistic you put on your campaign is true.
  

So how you change your Site Meter setting? You can do it by changing the Privacy Level of your account. There are 3 levels of privacy you can use :

• Normal - Your visitors can view all of your site traffic reports and charts
• Medium - Your visitors can't see any of your site reports and charts but the information in the "General Summary" report may be used and displayed in public lists or rankings with other sites
• High - Your visitors can't see your site reports and your site will not be displayed on any public lists.
  

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