A nod’s as good as a wink…

Posted on June 28, 2006
Filed Under Web News |

…and hints are all you’ll get from this campaign :)

We’re watching an understated little (one-page) site called Linkie Winkie. The site appeared a few days ago on June 23rd, and we saw its announcement in ThreadWatch in this story about a new viral experiment.

This nifty campaign appears on its face simply to be building a reciprocal link network automatically, but there’s more to it than this, although it’s hard yet to determine exactly what.

The authors of the campaign are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) people, but they describe Linkie Winkie as a social experiment rather than a SEO play. Read their chat over at SearchGuild forums in the linkiewinkie discussion.

The authors say they don’t care about inbound links as such (meaning presumably any particular ranking benefit from this). Instead, they seem to care about actual trafic. Smart people.

Their solitary page shows a live reading of their Alexa ranking. The site opened with an Alexa rank of above 200,000 - which means it wasn’t getting any traffic to speak of. [Click for more details about what Alexa is and how Alexa ranking works…].

Yesterday their rank was around the 22,000 mark, which is a huge gain in just a few days, which makes them a Mover and Shaker at least in our book. Today their rank is dropping, to about 28,000 - remember the Alexa rank numbers get greater as you fall away from the most-visited site, at top position ONE.

Also remember that all Alexa measures is traffic, or rather it estimates traffic. As Alexa points out itself, as the rank numbers get larger (meaning the sites are getting little traffic), its estimates are pretty crude and unreliable (many would say, worthless).

The picture is different for the highly visited sites however. Alexa traffic estimates for the more popular websites may or may not accord with webmaster logs of actual traffic, but the relative popularity shown in the Alexa rank is deemed pretty reliable at this high-traffic end of the Web.

All this matters because Linkie Winkie is more of an Alexa play than a Google one - socially vamping rather than sleezing up to the algo. We wish we could tell you more about what this campaign is doing, but we just don’t know. Certainly it exists to generate data, and certainly the authors are studying that data, and hopefully they’ll publish their findings.

It may be too, that the authors don’t really know what they want here. They speak of studying the ways in which the networks form, and perhaps they seek the Shape of the Matrix? They are SEO people and this means they are the best people in the world, but also means that any explanation they eventually give may be elusively coy, or tortuously complex, and quite possibly self-serving :P

One day an end will come to this story, and when it does we’ll write it up here.

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