The Alexa turning point

You might remember that on May 1, 2013 I moved all the content of the perl5maven.com site to be hosted on perlmaven.com. I recorded the Alexa ranking of both sites on the day before the move.

perlmaven.com was at position 5,337,012 which means the number of visitors was so small, it could be considered a rounding error. On the other hand perl5maven.com was at 362,104. Still not in he top 100K category, where Alexa starts to take itself seriously, but certainly in a much better position.

Then on May 1 I switched over everything to the perlmaven.com domain. According to Alexa, the numbers they show are based on 3 month average, so I knew the decline of perl5maven.com will be slow, just as the position of perlmaven.com will move forward slowly.

I was a bit surprised that I saw the position of perl5maven.com still improving the next day or two (when all the visitors were already redirected to perlmaven.com), but I guess it is due to a delay between the data collection and the actual display.

Lost Google Juice

Soon I noticed that new site has lost quite a few of the visitors. To be almost precise, the number of visitors dropped from 2,000 to 1,000.

As I wrote about it there were several factors. One of them is that at the time of the switch the Google Page rank of the perlmaven.com site was only 3 while it was 4 for the perl5maven.com site. As far as I can tell the Page rank of perlmaven.com has not improved since, but probably due to the articles published since then, the number of daily visitors went up a bit. It is still under 1,300 on most of the days.

The turning point

While the number of visitors have not picked up, the aggregated effect of the perl5maven.com redirecting every visitor to perlmaven.com brought us to the point where the Alexa position of the two sites changes places.

I watched it closely:

on 2013.6.25 at 17:40 ILT perlmaven.com was 643,520 and perl5maven.com was 617,514

on 2013.6.27 at 08:21 ILT perlmaven.com was 642,231 and perl5maven.com was 637,668

on 2013.6.27 at 18:56 ILT perlmaven.com was 640,744 and perl5maven.com was 642,958

on 2013.6.28 at 16:02 ILT still the same

So on June 27, 2013 was the turning point. It took almost 2 months, but finally the perlmaven.com site is ahead of the defunct perl5maven.com site. I expect the latter to reach 15,000,000 by the beginning of August, but I don't expect the perlmaven.com to make any spectacular progress. For that first it needs to re-gain the Google Page rank.

Which, I think, is a simple task that requires a lot of work.

I simply need to publish a lot of articles that you, dear reader, will find it worth to share via Google+, Reddit, Hacker News, or link to from your web site.