After reading the headline, you might be thinking that I am trying to attract your attention by providing a fake headline. But, after reading the article, you will think differently. You will be surprised to hear that a website improved its Alexa rank from a very low 11423846 to an amazing 2387 within just 5 days. While we all hardly trying to improve our Alexa ranks for a long time, we will feel jealous to hear such a great achievement of a website. Lol…
Update: It is later revealed that, the website and idea behind it was a scam and the man behind it was arrested. Anyway, the article still stays relevant as the theme is just about the website.
Some of you may have already guessed it. It is freedom251.com. The Indians are behind the smartphone that is priced at just Rs. 251. Millions of users have flown to the freedom251 website to pre-book their devices as much sooner as possible. But most of them couldn’t. The result was the website’s server crashed within a few hours of the launch due to excessive traffic received. As per the reports from the company, there were 6 lakh hits each second on the website. There is no wonder why the website crashed.
There are many speculations and rumors about freedom251. Some of them say that it is a scam (update: well it was) to cheat the people. But, some others are supporting the company because they are getting a device for less than the cost of a 3G data pack. Anyway, the freedom251 smartphone was the most discussed subject for the past few days. Some data from the Google trends are given below.
As you can see, Google Trends scaling it as the topmost trended search term for the last few days. Almost all searches were from India because the device was exclusive to Indians.
The above image shows the Alexa rank of the website for the past 5 days. As you can see, the Alexa was marked at 11,423,846 on February 16th. But today, when I am writing this article, it is 2,387! Such a huge change in Alexa in just 5 days! To be honest, this was the largest Alexa improvement I have ever seen in my life. The freedom251.com is now in the 2,387th position globally and 63rd position in India. You can check the Alexa rank here.
The above image shows the Upstream sites of the website. Google.co.in driven 21.2% traffic as per Alexa. Facebook.com, google.com, ndtv.com, and youtube.com are all in the top referrers list.
Most amazingly, the website was created on the 10th of this month. I mean 10-02-2016, as you can see in the following WHOIS data.
This also creates doubt about the quality of the company and increases the possibility to be a scam. Because they created the website just a few days before the announcement of the product.
So, you got a basic idea about the website, and it is time to analyze how the website achieved this. So, let’s have a look at the points that made this amazing improvement in Alexa.
Things Helped to Increase the Alexa Rank of Freedom251.com
Here I am listing some of the factors that drastically boosted the Alexa of freedom251.com.
Note: Alexa may or may not be that much accurate in measuring the details of a website. But, we are discussing the Alexa rank improvement of the website. So, I am considering it as the measurements.
Of course the Huge Traffic
It is needless to say that the website got huge traffic for the last few days. As I said before, the company stated that they got 6 lakh hits per second, resulting in a server crash. The idea of the cheapest smartphone in the world gifted them millions or even billions of traffic. The huge traffic received boosted Alexa drastically.
Got a Lot of Backlinks and Referrers
We all know, backlinks play a vital role in increasing the trust and authority of a website. But in the case of Freedom251.com, it gifted them a lot of traffic more than trust and authority. As we have seen in the above screenshots of the Alexa website. It got a major part of traffic from the dominant websites like Facebook and NDTV, which played a great role in directing the users to the website. The actual fact is that they were very successful in getting the media’s attention very fast. Because freedom251 is the cheapest smartphone ever produced by a company. So, the media’s and websites made a lot of news and articles about the phone, and in each one of them, they got at least one backlink that drove millions of traffic.
Note: Alexa may not show that many backlinks for the Freedom website because it is a new one.
Social Media Likes and Shares Played a Vital Role
As I said in the above paragraph, they were very successful in achieving the attention of social media and the users. They all loved to share the device and related news all over the internet. Here is the number of shares and likes the homepage of the website received as per the SEO Quake.
By MOZ toolbar
Both of them show the same results. This is the total number of Facebook and Google+ likes and +1’s received on the homepage of the website from the last few days. I am repeating, it is the number only for the homepage of the website. There are hundreds of articles from various sources regarding the same device. So, you can approximate the count.
Users Engaged On the Website
See this screenshot from the Alexa
As you can see the website has a bounce rate of 14.40% as per Alexa which is a strong signal for the user engagement of the website. Nevertheless to say that the website was extremely unresponsive due to high traffic. So, there might be a lot of time spent by each visitor on the site reloading the tabs or waiting for a response. This considerably increased user engagement.
What Alexa Neglected in The case of this Website
While analyzing the website, you might come across some exceptions made by Alexa in the case of this website. I am listing some of them below.
Domain Age and Authority
Domain age and authority are two vital facts that can decide the ranking of a website even in search results. Many tools and search engines are considering them for calculating the trust of the website. While coming to this, It has a domain authority ‘1’ and page authority too. As it is a new website, it will take some days or even months to get the actual domain and page authorities by calculating the backlinks and many factors. Below is the MOZ bar result of the website.
Alexa might have calculated the domain and page authorities as the same ‘1’. So, the domain authority has no impact on Alexa if the website has a lot of traffic.
While coming to the age of the website. It is needless to say about it. As displayed in the WHOIS data, the website is a brand new one. I repeat my words, the domain age have no impact on Alexa if the website has a lot of traffic.
What We Can Conclude
In this article, we just discussed the factors which helped the drastic boost in the Alexa rank of the Freedom251.com. There are many marketing and advertising factors that lead to these results. I haven’t listed them because it is out of the niche. So, what we can conclude from this is, If you have huge traffic on your blog or website, all other factors are just some small impacted ones. In the case of this website, the traffic was driven in a sudden moment, I mean in very few days. They haven’t tried hard in any of the ranking related facts. They just applied their business skills and the traffic automatically reached them.
But, the things are not likely as this for the normal bloggers or websites. If you can drive a good amount of traffic to the website without any of the depending on factors like Backlinks, Social Medias, Domain age, Domain authority, etc. All of them are just some side walkers. If you can’t, they are all needed to drive traffic.
If you are lazy enough, Just announce a Free smartphone tomorrow, and you will get billions of traffic for sure. 😉