Yesterday I wrote about 5 tricks some people use to increase their Alexa’s traffic ranks. The point of the post is not to say that Alexa is totally useless but the methods I described do not usually help in improving the rankings.

To the general web surfers, Alexa’s traffic ranking means almost nothing. But many advertisers and ad networks use Alexa to gauge whether it’s worth spending money and pay the site owner to advertise on the site.

If you are a blogger trying to make money from Text Link Ads or ReviewMe, having a good Alexa ranking put you in the position to charge more on your ad inventory.

For some site owners, getting a high Alexa traffic rank is more of an ego boost than a true reflection of their sites popularity. Others are trying to game Alexa so that they can command higher prices for their ad inventory among other things.

The recently released official Alexa toolbar for Firefox seems to re-ignite the obsession some people have over their Alexa ranking. I’ve seen several bloggers recommending tools and methods to game Alexa ranking.

Anyone who is not a US citizen, working on the Internet and get paid in US dollar is feeling the pinch of the weaker dollar.

At the same time, the local currency, Ringgit Malaysia is moving in the opposite direction and is getting stronger by the day. That means the checks I get from Google AdSense, or affiliate commissions from CJ worth less today than they were just a month ago.

If you are a blogger doing pay per post at your blog, you are actually making less money for the same amount of work.

When it comes to ads clicking, the general consensus I find among site owners who got dugg before was Digg users are lousy ad clickers.

It’s kind of obvious when you think that Digg users arrive at your site because they are looking for something specific. They tend to be very focused in their quest for information and they are there for one and one reason only and that is instant gratification.

If they haven’t installed ad blocker already, they are probably blind to ads since they are used to seeing them all over the place. The main demographic profile of the classic Digg user is perhaps college going Internet power user.

Technorati has updated its ranking scheme to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results.

Previously Technorati used the references of “N blogs link here” and “X links fro Y blogs”. These values are replaced with the single Technorati Authority number.

From their blog

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

For the past two weeks, I am seeing a trend where the number of daily visitors to Sabahan.com double.

If you are wondering how much traffic this blog is getting daily, well it’s still below the one thousand mark – not much compare to other more popular blogs. But that’s besides my point; I find it more exciting to see this sudden jump in Sabahan.com’s traffic level.

The increase in traffic coincides with the time when many bloggers reported that they were seeing an increase in their site’s Google PageRank. I didn’t experience any PR increase for my main page, but I suspect several of my internal pages have enjoyed a boost in PageRank.

Well if you use Alexa as the measuring stick, apparently Sabahan.com is number 9 on the list of most popular blogs in Malaysia.

In May last year, Syed Syahrul created a list of 70 most popular blogs in Malaysia. The list was updated recently and Sabahan.com is listed at number 9. Based on Alexa, it should had been there last year but it seemed that not many were aware of this blog existence back then.

As usual, LiewCF.com still reigns supreme taking the number one spot as the most popular blog in Malaysia. PaulTan.org at a close second and KennySia.com occupies the third spot.

I think I first heard about the Internet and how people were using emails to contact each other in 1992 but I’ve never really used it until 1995. Back then the email interface in my University was still in text based, so did chatting which used Telnet.

I remember I downloaded Doom and Duke Nukem – the first person shooter games and installed it on my department computer lab without the knowledge of the lecture.

Me and my friends stayed at the lab till midnight playing games – well that was fun.

A recent survey conducted by Symantec reveals alarming stats that showed 96% of computers in Malaysia are zombie machines.

This gives another reason for us to be more wary especially if you are using public computers such as those in cybercafes.

Zombie machines are PCs that have been compromised by hackers and used to send spam emails, or launched phishing attacked that lure unwitting computer users to reveal personal information such as credit card details and bank account passwords.

Chitika has a post up comparing Digg traffic versus Google traffic to show which one is more likely to click on an ad.

So they dig their logs to find out the answer and it’s not surprising to see Google traffic is likely to click on an ad than digg traffic.

Check out the full post here: Digg Traffic v/s Google Traffic - A Chitika Analysis Report