Linda Ikeji now ranked higher than Nairaland by Alexa and Google

Can a sub domain blog rank higher than one on a custom domain? It hardly happens and when it does, it simply means that the sub domain blog has done some extra hard work.

It's almost unbelievable that Linda Ikeji's blog, hosted on a free sub domain, could outrank the number one most visited online community of Nigerians called Nairaland. Nairaland has been there for much longer even before Linda Ikeji came along and probably even helped to drive traffic to Linda Ikeji's blog but now it seems that the student has performed better than the master.

Based on reports I have gathered, it appears that both Alexa and Google have confirmed than Linda Ikeji's Blog gets more traffic now than Nairaland does. Why did it happen? Is Nairaland dying? Has Nairaland reached it's peak? Is it only a temporary issue?

I remember Nairaland as far back as 2005 when it was first launched by Seun Osewa and it was set up as a large online forum for Nigerian to discuss issues on the internet relating to their society and I do remember that when Nairaland started, there were not many indigenous Nigerian online content websites that pulled a lot of traffic besides the likes of online newspapers like the Guardian, Punch and Vanguard.

Nairaland was built with a free online community based platform called Simple machines Forum(SMF) and because Nairaland had little or no competition when it was launched, it soon grew fast and popular within a few years as it attracted a lot of traffic from different categories of Nigerians. Many people loved visiting Nairaland because they loved discussing on issues and sharing their knowledge.

When Nairaland started, 21st century Nigerian bloggers like Linda Ikeji were probably still doing modelling or thinking of a future business to launch. It was later in 2007 that Linda started writing down and publishing her reports on a free blogging platform powered by Google. Linda Ikeji setup an online blog on Google's free blogger platform and it was located at a sub domain.

Setting up a blog on Blogger was probably easy for Linda since Google made it easy and setting up one was like setting up an email account. The platform allowed Linda Ikeji to just write and publish blog posts without worrying about paying for web hosting or getting a custom domain name. Linda just seemed to love the job of doing a kind of independent news reporting on the internet although most of her reports were about gossip, fashion, celebrities and entertainment. It was easier for Linda to set up and manager blog on blogger since it doesn't require much effort but the hardest part about blogging was getting the right gist to share with her readers and she had to do this everyday. Even with little or no web programming knowledge, she was able to run a successful blog and has become an inspiration for many other upcoming bloggers in Nigeria.

For people like Seun Osewa who had much knowledge about web programming, setting up Nairaland was easy but the hardest part was moderating discussions on the online forum. Seun had to set up a custom domain name, pay annually for hosting his domain and website but getting content was quite easy with an online forum where everyone is free to contribute to existing topics or create new ones. The hardest part with running an online forum like Nairaland is in administration and that includes moderating posts by members.

Nairaland grew relatively much faster than many other content websites in Nigeria being an online forum and having a large number of contributors. As at 2014, Nairaland had over 1 million registered members who were allowed to contribute to the online forum.

Linda Ikeji's blog on the other hand has mostly only Linda as the author although reports have it that she normally gets ghostwriters to get reports for her otherwise, she wouldn't be at many places at about the same time. Linda runs a blog that gets a lot of comments from Nigerians who like her reporting style. She can choose which comments get displayed and which ones don't. Using a platform like blogger, it's quite easier to just delay comments before they get uploaded to her website.

Alexa reports
In 2015, I've checked out the Alexa ranking report for both Linda Ikeji and Nairaland and found out that Linda Ikeji's blog has actually overtaken Nairaland by 2 points. Linda's blog is now ranked at the 12th most visited website in Nigeria while Nairaland which used to be among the first 7 is now at the 14th position. However, there is some consolation that Nairaland still beats Linda Ikeji's blog under the global rank since it's ranked 1419, while Linda's is at 2353. However, the local ranking shows that now more Nigerians tend to visit Linda Ikeji's blog than they visit Nairaland.

Google Trend Reports
Personally, I don't rely on just Alexa reports since they can easily be manipulated by installing multiple Alexa toolbars and so I also checked out Google trend reports. It's a platform through which Google freely offers users insights into what the world and people in different cities are searchin for. I tried comparing the keywords - Nairaland and Linda Ikeji on Google trends and found out that Linda Ikeji is also more highly searched than NAiraland on Google's search engine. I guess this might be because many visitor's to Linda Ikeji's blog find it hard to visit her blog directly and so just Google it first before visiting. It also however shows that people tend to remember the keywords Linda Ikeji than they remember Nairaland. It again shows that many people who visit Linda ikeji's blog might not be computer geeks but more mature adults who might not know how to use things like bookmarks.

However, the report I saw showed that the queries for Nairaland on Google has been overtaken by queries for Linda Ikeji as from March 2012 as shown in the graph.

Is Linda Ikeji becoming a better brand than Nairaland? Is the traffic that Linda Ikeji's blog seems to be generating now a sustainable one or just for the short term?

Nairaland survived a hacking attempt that saw a couple of it's data wiped out as at June 2014 and may have contributed to it's loss of traffic and ranking on search engines from which it gets most of it's traffic.

While we are not entirely sure how much exact traffic either of these websites get exactly in terms of unique visitors since they don't offer a traffic report using an independent reporting platform, we can only assume that for now, Linda Ikeji's traffic seems to be growing while that of Nairaland seems to be falling.

Perhaps, a punishment from search engines like Google might have reduced traffic to Nairaland as a result of lost pages or site restructuring, something which Linda Ikeji's did not experience, Nairaland still has something that Linda Ikeji's website doesn't and that is a lot of content.

Last time I checked, Nairaland has over 800,000 published posts and this is huge compared to Linda Ikeji' blog posts which are still under 50,000.

In summary, I think Nairaland's Alexa ranking drop is only temporary and could be corrected within 3 months or so. However, Nairaland would also have to do more work by probably making the forum not just a place for kids but also for adults. Linda Ikeji's blog tends to attract adults more than kids because of the type of content it has.