Alexa Hates Me

It’s strange why people place value in the website rankings from a statistical tool that inherently collects skewed data.

Alexa, a part of the mighty Amazon (the book store, not the rain forest), is well-known throughout the Web for their ranking and traffic measurement tools, but just how useful are they?

To answer that question, I suppose we need to first determine exactly what service or product it is Alexa provides.  The title of the Alexa home page tells us that they’re the Web Information Company.  Well, I’m not quite sure whether or not they could have been any more generic than that, but then they do have lots of interesting graphs and distracting button ads to avoid.

Playing around on Alexa.com gives me an indication of how popular other websites are and how mine fare against them, but the measurements only include those people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their active web browsers.  There was talk of other Alexa gadgets installed on websites helping to boost their figures, but I can’t say conclusively whether or not they actually do.

Okay, so you and everyone else can see how popular websites are with the users of the Alexa toolbar.  Since I don’t know a single person with it installed, I can’t really say whether there’s anything other than bragging rights on offer.

Alexa hates me.  The reason why I say this is because this blog has been stuck at over 250,000 for the past few months.

Why and what can I do to increase my Alexa figures? Should I even care?  I suppose one way in which I could lose out from a lower Alexa value is when it comes to advertising.  Advertisters might use Alexa to garner some visitor counts in order to help them decide whether a website is worth the fee.

I guess as a consolation, I could look towards this Alexa alternative as it shows this blog get an increasing amount of traffic on a month-by-month basis.