Lately I was wondering why nobody was taking advantage of my $15 text link ad through TextLinkAds considering that my Alexa was 152,000 and dropping on a consistent basis. Then I decided to see the prices and ratings for some of the blogs on TLA and realized that most Blogspot blogs had an Alexa of “14″ based on the fact that Blogspot.com is rated at an Alexa of 14.

There are some people that have had honest Alexa ratings such as BetShopBoy who had an original Alexa rating however there are many who seem to be taking advantage of Blogspots Alexa rank. Some may argue that Alexa isn’t the only deciding factor in how TLA decides the price of your blog but if you look at the listing in the Marketplace for TLA, you will realize that the only thing, other than price, that can be manipulated to decide which website you pick is the Alexa ranking. If you’re like me and want the best ranking then you will see that for anywhere in the range of $15 to $35 per month, you can buy a link on several blogs ranked at 14. Heres a screenshot below:

Flawed Alexa

It got me wondering as to how many blogs there actually were that had their Alexa listed at 14, I went through the pages and came up with around 15.5 pages with blogs that were hosted on Blogspot and had their Alexa rank showing “14″. Considering there were 15 listings on a page that means there were approximately 232 listings that can be counted as being a little flawed. Most of those blogs also had ad spots filled and had Technorati rankings that were at the 4 million mark. Surprisingly, an average of 3 ads were sold among all the listings. I am not pointing a finger at the blog owners but at the Text Link Ads system for basing a majority of the listings upon the Alexa rank. In essence what I want to suggest is that TLA account for other things such as Technorati in ranking their listings so that everything can be fair. What do you guys think about this?