The Industry

Alexa Problems

These problems seem to have been universal - though I have found nothing written up about them. Hmmm….

It all started about 2 weeks ago when the Alexa dailies started swinging wildly in the middle of the week for many of our comparable websites [not really our competitors, just those we keep an eye on], and then finally us as well. Usually the chart dips on a holiday or weekend for most websites - rarely on a weekday.

Then the stopped updating all together. The charts were frozen and the ranks were frozen. OK. They are working on a problem.

Days go by. What was it, 5? 6? Then they updated the charts for a few of the first days that had no data. And then they stopped updating the chart again for a few MORE days. Finally, about 3 or 4 days ago, they caught up to their usual 3-days behind daily chart updates and then, about 2 days ago, the ranks started updating again.

Now, today, they have now removed yet another country. First it was Hong Kong. Now New Zealand. Hong Kong was our number 2 country at the time and New Zealand was our number 1 country yesterday. Funny how that works. Either they are consolidating smaller countries into larger ones - or there is a bug that they just fixed that caused New Zealand, for example, to score way too high sometimes [but our Australia channels are some of our most popular].

Don’t know. But it looks like Alexa might be Baaaack now. For all those that decry its accuracy - we have found that the more sophisticated laymen, or unsophisticated experts, rely on it heavily and use it to judge a website and whether they take the website [i.e. our website] seriously or not. So it is not so much an SEO thing as a marketing tool