Alexa search - not liking the results

I was looking for a snapshot of Crafty Tips before it was hacked and remember that Alexa most likely had a screenshot. I found one, but also found something else.

When I searched for craftytips.com, I was offered an alternative - kinda like Google does. But the alternative was for a site that while similar could not be considered a mispelling of mine. The site is also about crafts with a two word site name (first word of craft second word of bits - don't want to give them any more help than they are already getting at my expense).

Is this something the other site is paying for? I could understand if it had offered craft tips, but bits?

Has anyone else seen something like this? Did you do anything about it or just let it go because it was only Alexa?

Alexa has some kind of algorithm to find relative sites, and they display those sites in your site's profile too.

I guess it is not something to worry about and I am not sure you can do anything about it.

Off topic : You've just made the post #23.000 ;)

Woo - hoo, and I wasn't even trying to get that. Congratulations everyone for the forum's continued success - special thank you to the founder - keep up the good work Nick.

related results are something you just have to put up with, though if your a commercial site its often worth considering purchasing similar sounding domain names to your own, and doing redirects, we once had a client with a .com domain name that was being unfairly gazumped by a .nz domain, in the end he bought the domain out. Not really the best solution but the problem went away. if you use common or keyword based names I'm afraid you have no recourse if your name is a unique brand you may have a small amount of legal protection, but not against some one putting the sites next to each other on related links.

Oh, it did list related sites underneath. I understand that. There even was a "featured" type listing for Woman's Day magazine. What surprised me was the offering of the other site as a "correct spelling" alternative. Along the lines of "Did you really mean?" That seemed a bit over the top.

If I search for her site, I don't get offered a Did you really mean type option but do get related sites.

yeah Alexa is doing it a little different, they mix Google results with their own Alexa ranked top sites. If more then one user suggests a website as related to another website alexa will remember this relation. Anyway don't accept to get traffic from alexa...

BTW the alexa thumbs are not longer for free...

Nah, don't get any Alexa traffic. Actually had someone come via search on MySpace yesterday - that was a first I think.

I needed the thumbnail only to show someone what the old site looked like - one time deal, won't be used online anywhere.

Guess I'll just have to live with another craft site being so strongly suggested along with my own. It rubs a bit as I link to her but she opted not to reciprocate - at least not the last time I checked.

You think my CURL method of getting the images will still work?

of course you can steal them form the alexa website, hehe

Yes it is still working, but they have changed the location of the 'no preview yet' image in a way that I can't identify the image. So now my site is not showing my own 'image coming soon' but the one from alexa :(

I like the thumbs at webdigity very much...

Yes, they are nice. Who makes them?

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);?> ;)


I will let someone else to answer that :)

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, I'm getting the alexa page with curl and the preview image looks something like this: www.somesite.com/imagepreview?sitetocheck.com&defaultimage:noimage.gif
This will look the same for sites that have a preview image as well as the ones that don't have one yet. Before the sites with no preview would just have a alexa.com/noimage.gif on the page, making it possible for my script to identify this.

They are redirecting to the actual thumbnail.

Also you have to "convince" them that you are a real browser ;)

just checked the alexa site for my blog site, with my latest blog I got 2000 extra visits and there no information about at Alexa.

can't believe that all of them doesn't use the alexa bar or alexa FF extension, wil say that their ranking is not really an indicator...