Comments on: Alexa stats now lagging by 6 days

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 20:49:31 +0000

When they came back on, all the stats seemed to catch up and match what I was expecting.

I did have some site downtime a couple of days ago which resulted in a hit in my own stats, but it all seems to tally up.

One thing of note, they certainly seem to take the weekend off.

Amazon do seem to be having server problems occasionally. MyBlogLog images are stored on Amazon S3 and I have noticed a few delays in pulling the small images down, at least to my desktop compared to other sites.

By: Joe Escobar

Joe Escobar — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 19:43:46 +0000

It is weird. Ever since you mentioned this. Alexa seems as though the stats just stopped for like 2 weeks, then they came back recently but they seem wacked out. I mean our site is doing more traffic than ever, and what would have previously shown up on alexa as I am sure a big increase has actually come through as a decline! I dont get it, and what is more weird is no one seems to have noticed or is blogging about it. This is for a site with a rank of about 5000. Have you seen or heard on what has changed/ or broken over there?

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:25:00 +0000

I actually had a look at Compete earlier

Unfortunately it is not just a question of accuracy for the top 10K websites.

I am interested in the traffic for sites 100K to 1M or even higher.

This particular domain has only been in existence for 6 weeks, but if they really do have 2M toolbar users in the US, you might expect them to have some data available more than their default security warning for sites they don’t know.

So I tested out some of my other niche sites that get far less traffic on a daily basis, have been established for over a year, and which get 50-100 page views per day, and make nice bread & butter income almost exclusively from US traffic.

The number of Compete community members who visited [removed domain name] in the past year has not been large enough to produce accurate traffic estimates.

The site has had an Alexa rating as high as 1M, and is currently 6M because it had some downtime and it is the off season.

Now if someone was in anyway “gaming” the Alexa rating of a site like that, it would be obvious. I use Alexa for sites that have Alexa scores so low, they can’t possibly be gaming things, and the webmaster probably has never heard of Alexa.

By: Rob Leathern

Rob Leathern — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:51:17 +0000

There is no doubt, Alexa stats are pretty awful. Even when they are up, they are severely biased because of how the data is collected (from people who are looking at the data). I’ve had the debate about whether they are consistently biased and I would have to say “no”. I wish there were some broad top-level traffic stats that could be made available by one of the traffic counter companies for free; Hitwise, Netratings, Comscore, Compete etc. could definitely get some mileage out of a broad free offering even if not “media quality”, but I don’t see that happening any time soon unfortunately.