Web Analytics RiceHigh's Pentax Blog: Alexa Ranking Display Box Removed from Blog

Friday, March 13, 2009

Alexa Ranking Display Box Removed from Blog

The Alexa web traffic data have been rather weird for my blog traffic since early February. Actually, Alexa has stopped recorded traffic to my web blog despite that my Statcounter has recorded much traffic and consistent increasing visits and large number of pageviews to my blog site during the same period.

Whilst I don't know the actual reason(s) for why Alexa now won't work for my site, I have decided to remove the Alexa traffic ranking display box from my site from now on, as the displayed figure is just wrong and hence misleading.

Btw, I have googled for why Alexa could fail, a quick search on key words like "Alexa problem" or etc. reveals many cases where errors and inaccuracies had arisen or could arise. Particularly, I have found this one to be quite interesting, for what it was played (paid) and shared. However, I have not yet found anyone actually have specifically reported that the Alexa data for his/her site had completely stopped, like what has happened in my case! :-(

Quite some people have written something on the net to explain why Alexa data could be inaccurate as it counts only the web traffic by sampling the web users/webmasters who have installed the Alexa toolbar and visit different websites (but not installing code at the web sites, unlike the principle of how Statcounter, Google Analytics or AWStats, etc. works). Yes, I know no sampling is perfect on this planet and it can always have the chance to deviate from the true statistics by the total population in realworld. But I just puzzle why the Alexa robot has totally "ignored" just(?) my site since early February? Bug in their software algorithms? Other problem of their system? Or, is what has happened actually related to what I wrote about Amazon at my blog earlier, in this article? Or for (any) other reason(s)? I dunno, really.

Whilst I think I shall never know the answer anyway, someone at Alexa may know, or may not even know (if it is just a bug or simply a system error).