Alexa numbers worse than useless
by Sapphire (July 11, 2006)
Am I the only one who wishes sites would stop reporting Alexa rankings like they mean anything at all? For example, this site ranks around 70,000. Another site of mine, which sometimes surpasses this one for traffic, ranks somewhere in the 5 millions.
Isn’t Alexa supposed to give people some idea how trafficked a site is? All they’re really telling is how many Alexa toolbar users read your site. Might as well tell people how many folks with names ending in R read the site. It’s garbage information being passed off as a valuable statistic.
Is it just the Amazon connection that’s allowed Alexa this false place of authority? Alexa’s About page advises:
Want to help? Install the Alexa Toolbar, and tell your friends. The more people use Alexa, the more useful it will be.
Yeeeeah. Translation: “All Your Sites Are Belong To Us Now.” Any other site doing what Alexa does would have had to gain enough credible info from their toolbar and proved themselves before they’d be considered an authority. Alexa’s ability to launch first and ask questions later has made it into a detriment, not an asset, for the web.
Posted in Traffic
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