Topic: Bitcointalk is not doing well in Alexa rank because of the Merit system (Read 648 times)

To be honest, I'm one of the user who actually found this site in Alexa in the year 2017, it was the year of ICO. many users who are spamming in this community that year got banned or got rid now by the forum moderators for good. Some of them have stopped posting because they are no longer qualified to join a certain campaign because of the lack of merits or the highest rank requirements. The reason why our Rank is falling at Alexa is due to the activeness of the moderator to clean some out of topic posts made by those spammers. there are lots of reporters lately which really help to clean this forum. Our community has improved since then, there are less out of the topic post and constructive replies are being made to avoid being report or tagged by the DT.

OP, I think your arguments is weak and your assumptions is wrong. Many people already said why you're wrong, I just want my 2 cents Satoshi. First, Alexa rank isn't main thing to determine popularity of website. Second, merit system isn't main factor why Bitcointalk Alexa rank decreased. It's probably insignificant factor at all. If you will check Bitcointalk traffic stats and charts of Bitcoin price, it has direct correlation. When Bitcoin goes up, Bitcointalk get more visitors and opposite. In the end of 2017, start of 2018, Bitcointalk had the most visitors, when Bitcoin price was ATH, there was peak of ICO projects.
And having less users isn't bad thing - I will pick quality over quantity. It's forum and main value of this forum is discussion. These people who came here here to earn easy money by spamming doesn't gives any benefits for this forum. Bitcointalk haven't lost anything after they left.
Why can argue about that Merit system isn't perfect, but in general I see only positive influence for Bitcointalk given by it.

The Alexa ranking might be important to advertisers who wants to advertise here, but I would much rather have a lower Alexa ranking than having a forum with millions of "newbie" accounts spamming the forum. We should also mention that the bot attacks and fake traffic that was generated by that, has been mostly neutralized with the introduction of the Captha system. 

I think advertisers would much rather be linked with a well organized forum with a good reputation for good moderation and genuine traffic and not the opposite of that. 

Bitcointalk.org have now struck a balance between offering a great advertising platform and also a fun experience for it's members, with the introduction of the sMerit system. 

Of course thats true, because alexa ranking is not a site that promotes bitcoin forums but rather sites that analyze traffic from sites.

The level of accuracy that is not well indicated by the alexa ranking for the site bitcointalk.org is also not a reflect that the forum has lost many users, only the traffic measured by alexa ranking is a site search keyword or SEO. IMO

Of course, bitcoin forums have high search traffic from 2017 to 2018 because bitcoin is very popular among people because of the very high price jump of 20K usd. But after that, we can also monitor that there is a decrease in the number of active forum users during this time period due to several factors below:

• Merit system in January 2018
• Many ICOs end up scam
• Many bounty not worth it
• e.t.c

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have become popular assets and are already one decade old, we can find lots of news about it on social media and elsewhere. Increased adoption is also a determining factor that the forum is the right place to discuss a few of the problems in it without the need for promotion from other parties.

Alexa ranking does not affect the ups and downs of the number of users. after all, ranking on alexa does not reflect this forum abandoned by users. because, as far as I know, Alexa ranking will increase if more members are using the Alexa addon in the browser he uses. this is makes Alexa ranking accuracy does not reflect how many users are actually active.


On the other hand, this forum is well known to the crypto community and does not need alexa to get revenue from advertising. just look at how much money this forum has from donors and banners. This is very enough to support the forum without having to alexa tracking to get advertisers.

And why should it? According to Google Trends, forum activity in 2015 and 2016 is roughly equal to activity right now. And that was way before there was a merit system. The interest is measured in percentage so we're at 5% of popularity the forum had in 2018.

As long as google search queries about bitcoin related things turn up with bitcointalk links in the first page of results, I don't see a problem with the way things are going now.

I don't understand what you are saying. You didn't make any point literally regarding the thread. And what it has to do with my post count being equal with my activity. I think you should contribute something related to the article on alexa rank and the merit system. I have been clarified that the forum doesn't care about their Alexa ranking. I am not complaining, I'm sharing my opinion.

So I decided to take a look at your account.



Your post count and activity count is literally equal. Are you just complaining about the system because you aren't able to rank up due to the merit system? Like 99.9% of the people complaining about the merit system? Stop it with this shit. This has been discussed a hundred times in the past already.

Looool, I didn't expect to see my topic mentioned here. So I'm the reason why the forum scares the visitors and also for being low ranked on Alexa, right? My, oh my, what have I done Well this must be indeed an allegation based on pure logic.


On October 25th 2019 I was a Newbie, with a few posts and 0 merits. I earned 600 merits in about 6 months and a few days starting literally from zero. If you share valuable information, your content will be appreciated. The condition is to post indeed valuable information. If you want just to spam: heheee the way is infinite. I saw a member a while ago who had 6000 posts and 0 merits. There are a lot of members supporting newbies which are posting high quality texts / essays, or at least which try to post something valuable. Nobody would expect you to post like a Bitcoin expert while you are a beginner, but at least you can try to share coherent thoughts. And to use an adequate English, not perfect but adequate - meaning to not sound like a caveman.



I repeat: I was a newbie too. And honestly, I did not know a single thing about activity, merits, the correlation between them default trust, Marketplace trust, feedbacks, flags, merit sources, signature restrictions, PMs / posts restrictions for each rank, evil IPs / points, copper memberships and so on. But I searched on Google. For example: "what is merit BitcoinTalk" / "what is activity bitcointalk". And, eventually, I found the correct topic answering my question. What is important is that I really wanted to learn how the forum works and not to be here for spamming it or for using it in various obscure ways. If you want to learn how the forum works, you can really do it.


I already answered that.


The forum wasn't built for fun reasons. If you need fun, you can watch standup comedy on YouTube. However, you can find plenty of humor here, in a lot of topics and from a lot of members.


Similar to previous answer: the forum wasn't built to rank up on Alexa, as Bitcoin wasn't created to be valued to 10.000$. The forum was created for Bitcoin-related discussion, for improving it, for spotting bugs in the code and so on, while Bitcoin was not meant to be listed on exchanges nor to reach a certain amount in USD - it was invented for eliberating people from the oppression of the governs, by giving them the absolute power over their finances and by offering them anonymity pseudonimity.

I hope this helps.

Sorry I didn't understand your question. A 1st place at alexa traffic is not the issue at least a better rank on Alexa traffic like in 2018 were we had some good rank around 900. It's all good though hope I passed the right message to this forum. But it is not really important here now I understand.

I don't know the site with that ranking on Alexa. I have seen some reasons why this forum may not be interested in their Alexa rank since they have already ranked in the most important keyword "Bitcoin forum" that is a nice work so far.

But perhaps that is not the main goal of this forum...
When I type "bitcoin forum" in a search engine like duckduckgo, then voila, I get bitcointalk.org as the first entry. With startpage it is the fourth entry. Sounds very good to me.
What would a 1st place at Alexa Traffic do better?

(Alexa Traffic has nothing to do with Alexa from Amazon, does it?)

The merit system changed one thing!
You can't farm high-rank accounts based only on activity, this, and only this.

You don't need to be legendary, you don't need 500 merits to write on the forum, and you don't even need an account to READ.

The number of visitors dropped because there were no more "bounties" no more earning twice the average wage in your country by posting links. That's all.
The moment you stop paying people for posting, traffic drops, it's normal.

Take a guess which site this is, also crypto-related and with no merit system:



What the merit system has done is actually clearing a lot of shitposting, a lot of useless answers, and made it a place far better for real newbies.

The alexa rank helps you to know how good your site is performing in bringing traffic, So the importance of Alexa rank is to know if your site is doing well or not within the past 90 days.

Well, in the end, it will completely depend on the person's intention. If a blog is a certain person's main source of income, then of course he/she's going to take extra more time and effort to optimize SEO, in contrast to the other blogs which are just made mostly as a hobby.

Yeap, in this case I really don't think SEO matters that much for Bitcointalk at all(even though it ranks #1 on the "bitcoin forum" search query anyway), as it is THE Bitcoin forum anyway. I don't think anyone even suggests the bitcoincom forum(rightfully so).

The sense of the merit system has already been sufficiently discussed in the whole forum and therefore I will not comment on it. But what I am asking myself now is, how important is the Alexa rank and if it is important, how can we increase it?

I personally have some blogs that's not really SEO optimized. But it has some readers already and that's good enough. Optimizing SEO really takes a lot of my time and comparing to the cost and benefit of having ranked first on Google search doesn't mean much to me.

Bitcointalk is big enough already, I don't think trying to get first on every SEO-related website is a good thing to pursue too. And anyway, I believe the lack of good bounties contributes more to the traffics compared to the merit system in general.

Site rankings through Alexa, SimilarWeb, and other sites are mostly based on web traffic, so post/content quality is automatically out of the equation.

Why would Alexa rank be down because of merit system?
I would feel like it would go up since people will want to post good content to get merit (like me ) and will spend more time on the site as a result

But your research is interesting, wouldn't have thought that

The difference between ranks is mostly cosmetic: signatures, avatars, personal text. There's no limits to posts or anything, so why should newcomers be afraid of merit system? You can use this forum as newbie rank just as well as legendary rank. If it scares away shitposters who heard tales about how you can make money by posting on this forum, then it's a good thing no matter how you look at it, because if the quality of conversations is better, it would attract more users in the long run.