Alexa punishes blogs by ignoring Firefox?

The site I nickname the B-2 Bomber did well in Alexa when it first launched. Then it plummeted to something like 1.9 million and stayed there for a long time, even though the traffic was growing steadily every month. Now, suddenly today it’s taken a huge leap back into the six-digits, which comes slightly closer to representing the reality of the traffic. (This site gets considerably less traffic, but ranks around 70,000.)

I did some poking around and realized that a lot of blogs with high PR, that I know to be established and well-trafficked, are ranked unrealistically low by Alexa. I’m guessing the reason is something as simple as bloggers not favoring the Alexa toolbar. Most bloggers I know are a bit on the techie side, and the vast majority use Firefox, which Alexa has no intention of creating a toolbar for.

I know Alexa doesn’t just rely on toolbar statistics: they also look at inbound links. The problem is, there again, I don’t see many of the blogs that link to me. Lots of directory links, WikiPedia links, etc. But none of the hundreds of blogs Technorati comes up with.

Maybe people who interested in advertising on blogs should look not at Alexa rankings but Technorati?

1. Alexa numbers worse than useless
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4. Is anybody else seeing all their sites plummet in Alexa?
5. SEO-Open Firefox extension

Categories: Blogging   |   Tags: Project B-2 Bomber  |  2 Comments »