Bloggers Boycotting Alexa.com Rankings.

Posted by Fox on June 21, 2007 at 1:33 AM

That's it, I'm done with Alexa.com - I'm sick of potential advertisers using Alexa Rankings to determine what they think my ad space is worth.

I simply refuse to do business with any company that puts any credence in a sites alexa rankings. Yeah I know it'll not have much impact on alexa.com, but I have to take a stand somewhere.

At the time of writing this, my site www.smstoday.co.uk only has an Alexa Ranking of 325,000. (If it's gone up or down since I wrote this article, I really don't care).

Anyway, if you listen to some of the marketing peeps that have contacted me recently, regarding advertising on my site, makes my ad space almost worthless. This, despite the fact that my pages rank incredibly well on various search engines, using numerous, highly relevant search terms.

So What's My Problem With Alexa.com?
Bottom line, it's the way in which Alexa collects the data used to determine a ranking of a particular site.

Here's the thing, they ONLY come up with the rankings by collecting data from web users that have gone through the process on downloading the alexa browser plug-in.

I'll write it again...

They ONLY come up with the rankings by collecting data from web users that have gone through the process on downloading and installing the alexa.com browser plug-in.

So do you have it installed? No? Then you viewing this page will have absolutely no impact on the alexa ranking for this site. You simply DON'T count, my friend.

So who does have this browser plug-in installed?
There are numerous theories. Typically it'll be tech savvy webmasters, programmers etc. Certainly not my target audience. Are they yours?

Alexa's own disclaimer goes someway to explaining how 'effective' their method of data capture is...

The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:

Our users are disproportionately likely to visit sites that are featured on alexa.com such as amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be overcounted

The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of the various browsers is unknown. Alexa's sample includes users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla browsers. The AOL/Netscape and Opera browser is not supported, which means that sites operated by these companies may be undercounted.

The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of various operating systems is unknown. Alexa sample includes toolbars built for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Chinese sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in China, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Chinese Alexa users.

In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.

The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https:). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.

In addition to the biases above, the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa's data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors.

Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

So, mostly bollox then. Stop wasting my time, banging on about Alexa Rankings. Even they admit their data is shit and I've got more important things to do.