There seems to be some serious problems with Alexa - most of the high traffic blogs including TechCrunch, Mashable, Problogger, BoingBoing and ReadWrite Web have registered a significant dip in their Alexa ranks.
TechCrunch, which enjoys an Alexa rank of ~600 during normal days, was down to ~7000 at the time of writing this post. Other top blogs have followed exactly the same pattern (see graph B.)
Graph A: Alexa data for last 6 months (the free-fall started in August)
Graph B: Close-up version of the top graph but for the last seven days
What's interesting here is that while blogs have taken a hit, the ranking of other top Alexa websites like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, etc have remained fairly constant over the same period.
Is this a bug or can it be attributed to Alexa Sparky - the Firefox tool bar for Alexa that was released last month. What do you think?
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/have-alexa-changed-their-ranking.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
alexa ranking is not accurate for sure.. i guess the free fall is due to the fact that alexa was down for some time..
maybe they didn't want to show themselves as fools so they kept google yahoo intact.. and let the algorithm take over other sites..
and why do you think it could be because of sparky?
Written on 9/8/07 4:44 PM
it coincided almost to the day that the firefox extension was released. I suspect it's not a coincidence. I know my traffic's actually been up this month - so something changed :-)
Written on 9/8/07 5:08 PM
It looks like Alexa went out for a vacation leaving the stats to yahoo or msn crawlers!
Written on 10/8/07 5:15 AM
I agree with Darren on this one. I got a massive Stumble spike just after the extension came out and traffic has been up over that period and yet my Alexa has dropped.
All very odd...
Written on 10/8/07 5:42 AM
but who need to fix this bug ? mozilla people or alexa people?
because, Is a great bug
Written on 17/8/07 5:48 AM