What it looks like when Google links to your website

[alainbryden]

Congrats! I love alternativeTo. It's my way to train parents and friends to find the best free alternatives to whatever ad-bloated software SEO'd their way to the top of Google last time they decided they needed to convert a movie or download music.

This simple piece of advice (and a bookmark in their favorite browser) has greatly reduced the amount of PC rebuilding I've had to do for them over the years!

[raawmarkus]

Thank you, that's so great to hear.

[imdhmd]

hey alternativeTo team,

congratulations!

at this achievement, i hope you will put some effort (also) in improving the UX of the site so that users like me get keep visiting whenever we want an alternative.

Some observations (at http://alternativeto.net/software/google-reader/ page):

- Ads are covering a large part of the area

- The list of alternatives are not prominently visible (need to scroll down)

- UI is a bit cluttered (offering too many options)

[raawmarkus]

Thank you!

We're always trying to improve the site but the design for the desktop version of the site hasn't been worked very much on lately. We are aware that there is always room for improvement.

Ads: we need them. Sorry.

List of alternatives not prominently visible: The problem here is that we don't know exactly why a visitor is coming to an application page. It could be to find alternatives to the application or it could be that they are interested in the selected application because it was listed as n alternative to something they want to replace. I absolutely understand what you're talking about here and we have some plans already to make this better, but after we discussed your comment we came up with a even better solution that we hope we can do something about this fall.

UI is cluttered: We have plan to hide more stuff. There is a plan.

Thanks a lot for the great feedback! We appreciate it.

[computer]

One thing that's bothered me almost every time I visited your awesome site over the last few years is that the link to the actual product is quite small and hard to see, in both places.

For me personally a big "Go to site" button would make the site even nicer.

[MichaelApproved]

I'd like to hear how they were able to handle the dramatic increase in traffic over such a short period of time.

[olaj]

It was actually pretty easy to deal with. Since we usually have around 50-70K visitors/day we are used to a lot of traffic.

Our setup is one Windows Server 2008 R2 with 12gb RAM and Intel Xeon E5520 @ 2.27Ghz with 8 cores. The page is built with ASP.NET MVC + Web Forms (The alternative page is Web forms).

Anyway, ASP.NET scale really really well and since only a small % actually login to the site we can just cache more or less everything. Usually when sites go down because of massive traffic increases i think there is some kind of bug somewhere or they are just being blocked by their hosting provider.

/Ola (From AlternativeTo)

[bnchrch]

With out getting to specific into their backend (because I dont know what theirs is) I'd assume they must of prepared for Google Reader deadline

[aviraldg]

<tangential>

"...AlternativeTo had about 217.000 visitors on that first day..."

Why can't we all agree upon a universal, consistent notation for math and science?

</tangential>

[RyanMcGreal]

Agreed. Three decimal places is awfully high precision for a measurement of people.

[Fuzzwah]

I have little trouble reading period for thousands separation. Complaining about MM/DD/YYYY date formatting is something that I whinge about way more often.

PS: I'm an Aussie living in the US.

[adPothier]

The metric system still fails to impose itself universally, so we can wait some time before the decimal mark is unified...

[raawmarkus]

I agree! It's a mess. We're based in Sweden so we do it this way.

[dorfsmay]

On a slightly different tangent, why do people put the dollar sign in front of the numer?

[tripzilch]

this is why I usually use spaces to separate thousands, so that I don't confuse people expecting either notation.

The standard where I'm from is also a period for thousands, and a comma for the decimal fraction, but reading as much English scientific and computing literature, I am well aware that the period for decimal fraction is almost a de facto standard. So I tend to use spaces for the thousands and a period for the decimal fraction, so that anyone who sees the spaces can infer what the other symbol means.

Fortunately I am not aware of any notation system that uses a space to separate the decimal fraction :)

[bhaak]

s/217.000/217'000/ FIFY

[mechatronic]

When I saw the link on the "reader is dead" page, I thought oh man alternativeTo is going to blow up... I hope they're ready.

[tobeportable]

I felt good for them. They really need more recognition.

[olegp]

We've also had a lot of traffic to https://starthq.com/apps/?q=reader as people look for Reader alternatives. Google should do this more often.

[fourstar]

What a great idea. They should make a website so that when people search it gives them a suggestion of a site based on their query.

[ColinWright]

Not sure you'll see this, but this is what your page looks like on my browser:

http://www.livmathssoc.org.uk/images/AlternativeTo.png

I have, of course, scrolled down past the image. It took some considerable time before I realized there was any text there.

Just thought you'd like to know.

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) 
    Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

(don't ask)

[raawmarkus]

Hi Colin,

I just HAVE to ask :)

Anyway, that doesn't look good and I'm sorry for that. I use a Wordpress theme that I bought and I guess it just doesn't support your browser.

[zmmmmm]

I was pretty surprised to read that (apparently) Google did this without even a heads up to alternativeTo. Seems like it would have at least been polite, if nothing else ...

[joeblau]

I wrote an open source project and when I landed on the first page of Google's search results, my traffic spiked and continually stays at about 10k-15k requests per week. Before hitting Google's first page of results, I was down in the 1k-2k range.

[seagreen]

Markus, what license is the content of AlternativeTo under? Have you considered one of the Creative Commons licenses like Stack Overflow?

[olaj]

We haven't thought that much about it actually. The only experience I have with it is that the whole web is filled with crappy spam sites that is using the content from Stack Overflow to earn a few extra bucks and that is kind of irritating.

Maybe someone has done something really useful with the data as well that i don't know about though.

But if someone have any awesome idea and want to do something together we are always listening :)

/Ola

[ekr]

Probably one of the reasons Google linked to them, is that they have so many Google ads on their pages (3 of them - quite disturbing to me). And Google takes about 32% of the price paid by the advertiser.

Just a back-of-the-envelope calculation: let's assume 217000 page views, with a 1% CTR, and a 1$ CPC. The result (of that 1 day) : ~2000$.

[proexploit]

There's no way $2000 even factored into Google's decision of who to link to.

[babuskov]

Both 1% CTR and $1 CPC are more than you would expect from average website. Across all my websites I have 0.38% CTR and $0.27 CPC.

The result is then ~ $200, not $2000.

[raawmarkus]

I'm not interested in arguing about Google's reasons for linking to us but I just wanted to point out that it was not 217.000 pageviews but rather "users" or "uniques". Pageviews were 2-3 times that number.

[paranoiacblack]

Or because they had good alternatives to Google Reader that would be updated and voted on by a good user-base? No, nevermind, can't be that.