The Travelling Programmer

22 Feb 09

That Alexa Website

I just realized that that Alexa website is pretty much bogus.  I've tracked the Alexa ranking of comfypage.com for some time now.  Over time we have risen reasonably steadly through the rankings.  Although I once saw our one week average peak at about 99,000, from memory, our three month average has been pretty stable in the mid two hundred thousands.

Recently however I moved to Thailand.  That means I haven't been on the net much for the past fortnight.  More specifically it means that my alexa plugin enabled browser hasn't been on the web much lately to report my activities back to the Alexa website.  Since I left Australia our Alexa rankings have plunged to about 900k.  That's weird...

Something else is weird.  According to Alexa our most popular site is andrew.comfypage.com.  This site.  According to Alexa andrew.comfypage.com accounts for 38% of comfypage.com's total traffic.  Although I've had some nice sized spikes in traffic the average number of people coming to this site on any given day is typically in the sub five region.  I personally make up a big chunk of my own readership.

By contrast comfypage.com itself, which gets two orders of magnitude more traffic is apparently only contributing 17% of our traffic.  That just doesn't make sense.

I can only think of one explanation for these two phenomena.  A big chunk of Alexa's statistics for comfypage.com are derived from my own personal net usage.  I go to andrew.comfypage.com a lot because I post here.  That explains the conspicuously large amount of traffic Alexa claims this blog receives.  And of course when I'm off the net this site's reported traffic goes down hence comfypage's plunging ranking.

That's right folks, a big chunk of Alexa's stats for comfypage.com are based on the net usage habits of a single individual.

This is all inferred based on what information Alexa makes public but Alexa's stats appear to be being extrapolated from a really small pool of data.  So small that it calls into question their veracity or usefulness.  If our rankings are hinging on my personal net usage then I could easily pump up our ratings by simply hiring a few new staff and mandating that they install the Alexa plugin.  For that matter I could simply ask my friends and family to install the plugin and set their homepage to comfypage.com.  If I alone can get comfypage.com to ~240,000 then my mum and dad may well see us crack the top 200k.

Take these rankings with a grain of salt folks.  They may not be all that they appear to be.

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