Comments on: Alexa’s New Interface, And New (Old) Audience

By: Marc

Marc — Sat, 19 May 2007 02:23:04 +0000

Mike: You’re right, Alexa is certainly inaccurate and I don’t put much stock in it either, but advertisers do. If you’re not involved in selling ads without a contextual broker (e.g. Adsense) then it’s not an issue. If you are in that business, then Alexa rankings become an issue. It’s not the be-all-end-all metric, but it’s one of the ones they use.

Dave: I had no idea that you could actually dump Alexa code on your site to have yourself counted. I don’t know if that would do me good or do me harm though

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:14:55 +0000

I think that they look at page impressions if you put the html code on your site. Of course that would still only leave toolbar users and sites with the counter in contention.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:32:53 +0000

The Alexa toolbar was a terrible piece of software for a long time. It may still be. Spyware/adware programs used to forcibly remove it, no idea if they still do or not.

I would expect that someone with traffic comprised of tech-savy users would be shortchanged. Similarly, a blog about privacy-related issues might suffer.

Someone with a lot of links from MySpace, on the other hand, would probably benefit.

Alexa doesn’t release things like “how many people visit your site”, so there is really no way to compare its accuracy with reality.

Personally, I ignore Alexa rankings completely. I think their data gathering methods are crap, their reporting is crap, and their toolbar is crap. If I want general information about the web, I’ll go to Nielsen/NetRatings. If I want information about my site, I’ll fire up any one of a dozen different log analysis tools. If I want to see how I am doing relative to others, I’ll fire up a search engine. My methods may not be accurate, but at least they don’t rely on a 12 year old installing a toolbar.