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Alexa, Amazon's Most Flawed Idea

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ain't-that-the-truth dept.

Rub3X writes "The Alexa ranking system is naturally flawed. The data should never be treated as accurate, as it's easily manipulated, and not supported for most browsers in the world. It's an estimate, and nothing more. " I've been saying that forever, but unfortunately for me, since it's a number on a website that is considered "Real" to some, I'm supposed to take it seriously. I imagine this is a problem for many webmasters out there.

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. The data shows there are problems by technoextreme · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've pointed this out before. There are weird statistical anomolies that should show that Alexa's webratings are not perfect. Take a look at this data for Slashdot and Digg. The traffic ratings both shoot up withing a s short amount of time. It just doesn't make much sense. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=www.digg.com&y =r&url=www.slashdot.org#top

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    1. Re:The data shows there are problems by jamie · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If so, it kind of makes the case that Alexa data is less than useful.

      But that's not all that's going on. In Nov-Dec 2005 it shows Slashdot's traffic roughly tripling, then settling down to roughly double its previous level, in the space of about a month. I have our traffic logs from that time. They were basically flat. All of the variance was Alexa anomalies.

    2. Re:The data shows there are problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I remember about 5 years ago we were making a new website and it wasn't launched yet, but it was publicly visible. About 5 of us had the Alexa toolbar installed and we were spending a bit of time on the site checking it and making sure links worked etc. A couple of weeks in to it - before we had even launched the site we had an Alexa ranking of around 60,000.

      Honestly Alexa must know it's a big joke. It still annoying to see it given any relevance.

  2. Duh by UbuntuDupe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I remember for a while LewRockwell.com, which promoted alexa for its readers, was top-500, beating out worldnetdaily.com and gamefaqs.com. Now, nothing against LewRockwell.com, and it is indeed surprisingly popular, but there's no way in hell it's a top 500 site.

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  3. Wikipedia editors constantly need to be smacked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wikipedia constantly uses Alexa to see if linking to a website or profileing a website is "notable". Despite outrage by the people who submitted the content, usually everything that gets nominated for deletion has some editor cite alexa as a reason to delete it.