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I have never trusted alexa and its ranking system. I do mountain gorilla tracking tours and i have a new site that i have been monitoring however, i get completely different results from that on my webstats. Are we being taken for a ride?(look at cnn)
8 commentsThursday, April 17, 2008
WebProNews On Alexa
By Doug Caverly
That Alexa's ranking system needed improvement is something upon which almost everyone could agree. Now it's been altered, and unfortunately for Alexa, the consensus still lies in that direction.
A number of people are happy with the changes, of course; some sites have seen huge increases, so they're more than okay with the way things stand. But the new rankings make the old ones look ridiculous, and even now, it appears that accuracy is lacking.
WebProNews On Alexa
Allen Stern writes, "CN dropped from ~25,000 to ~76,000 which is a shocking drop of 51,000 spots. I actually believe this is a huge mistake and is the highest drop I've seen so far. Yet our sister site, HTMLCenter actually moved up about 30,000 spots and now sits at ~95,000. The kicker is this: HTMLCenter currently has 15% of the traffic that CN has."
Alexa claims to be drawing information from more sources and using improved methodology. Whatever it's doing, though, conversations about the update are often turning into plugs for Compete and Quantcast, which probably wasn't the company's goal.
For the record, Alexa currently gives WebProNews a traffic rank of 9,372, and because we haven't much watched that stat, we have no idea how it compares to our pre-change standing.
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My industry lives and dies by Alexa
I operate Benchmark Reviews, which offers performance hardware tests and enthusiast guides to the PC industry. One of the mainstay needs in my industry is a relationship with manufacturers for product sponsorship. In the fourteen months of operation, I have discovered that Alexa is the tool most widely used by our sponsors, and it has opened doors to some companies while others won't even respond to our calls or email.
The bottom line here is that Alexa means nothing to the average person who doesn't get "graded" by someone else, but to hardware reviews websites like my own they are a necessary evil. Even with Google Analytics being so much more accurate, there's no public way to compare site A to site B, and this is where Alexa and Compete come into play.
For the record, my site receives 170,000 unique visitors (according to GA) and had a pre-change rank of 94,430. After Alexa made its changes we became ranked 74,404. Am I happy with that? Hell yeah. Would I be totally f*ed if it had gone the other way? My business would be gone.