As many WUWT readers know, I have been using alexa.com for quite sometime to gauge the performance of WUWT. Reader “Pat” brought this recent strange disparity to my attention. When you see things like the Drudge report plummet and MSNBC soar, you know immediately that something isn’t right:
Those who run watchdog news websites are scratching their heads and trying to make sense of the latest data released by a California company that measures website traffic.
According to data for July through September, almost every major website – from WND to the Drudge Report and Breitbart – saw its rankings drop on Alexa.com while pro-government sites mostly went up.
Source: WND
The claim seems to be true when you look at Alexa’s publicly reported traffic graphs. Here’s the Drudge Report according to Alexa:
(Lower numbers are better, for example, Google is #1)
![drudge[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/drudge1.jpg?quality=83)
And here is MSNBC according to Alexa:
I find that hard to believe. I find this even harder to believe, Fox News according to Alexa:
![Alexa_Fox[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/alexa_fox1.jpg?quality=83)
And the Soros driven Center for American Progress, aka thinkprogress.org according to Alexa
The exception to that knee up for left leaning websites starting in September is CNN.com according to Alexa:
So, this may be some sort of reporting or tracking goof. But, the oddity does not stop there.
Now, look at WUWT compared to the eco-news website “Grist”, which we long ago surpassed.
First, here is WUWT according to Alexa. Note the same “knee” in the graph as seen on the Drudgereport earlier:
And here is grist.org according to Alexa. Same “knee”, opposite direction:
Hmmm.
My internal wordpress.com counter for WUWT shows that WUWT had its best month ever in total views, nearly 5 million:
And, WUWT’s best ever day in its seven year history was in September 2014:
Something is broken at Alexa that seems to favor one sort of website over another. What’s up with that?
It may have to do with this recent “upgrade” at Alexa that explains a new method of calculating its rankings based on what it says is a wider panel of viewers.
“We’re excited to announce that after a lot of hard work, the size of Alexa’s global traffic panel will be significantly increasing,” writes Leigh Katcher in the blog. “Over the next month we’ll be incorporating lots of new data points, which will help improve the accuracy of our metrics. As a reminder, our data panel is a sample of global Internet traffic used to calculate Alexa ranks and estimate non-Certified metrics.”
The blog posting continued, “With better data, we’ll be able to offer deeper insights into your site, your competitors’ site and overall traffic strategy. One immediate result of the additional data is that you may see your traffic rank fluctuate, especially for sites ranked greater than 100,000.”
One wonders how such an “upgrade” can affect one type of site more than others. In the WND article, they say the disparity even extends to things like Planned Parenthood versus Lifenews, two sites that offer politically opposing viewpoints.
That’s a lot of hockeysticks.
It is time for Drudge, WUWT and all the other conservative sites to stop referencing the stupid things MSNBC and the other “progressive” sites publish. Those references alone probably increase traffic.
And to increase groupthink. You need to see what those who disagree with you are saying to hone your arguments and understand your own weaknesses.
Only God has all of the truth. And He doesn’t blog.
God has a lot of busy little bees. Besides, he turns evil against itself.
Nobody believes in governments anymore, except the ones who profit from it. Look at the reaction to Ebola. The director of the CDC oozes incompetence in his daily briefings, with stops and starts in his reading of the Teleprompter.
I would also look at an organized effort among those on the left to cook the data, sorta like an Alexa bomb (see Google bomb of George Bush for an example). As I understood it to work last I looked Alexa uses data from browser plugins to monitor traffic among others. Webmasters have long been aware that for a low ranked site downloading the plugin yourself as you visit your own site constantly could do wonders for your rank. I wonder if an organization on the left could make sure the plugin was installed on all their members/employees/users etc computers so as to skew the data with an non representative sample…
But why?
OK, advertisers are likely to skew their payments on hits but equally so on the demographics.
It just seems like a bit of a pointless thing to do.
1984 here we come
As taught by the left’s godfather; “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how. Я считаю, что совершенно неважно, кто и как будет в партии голосовать; но вот что чрезвычайно важно, это – кто и как будет считать голоса.(The Memoirs of Stalin’s Former Secretary (1992) by Boris Bazhanov [Saint Petersburg] (Борис Бажанов. Воспоминания бывшего секретаря Сталина).
So, does this mean Alexa has hired Gavin?
But WUWT is up…..you’ve been exposed, you closet commie!
We all saw how google manipulated searches to make it harder to find “climategate” – those who control the story are always inclined to twist things to their agenda. Don’t believe anything you read or are told! Check the facts as best as you can and if there are no facts to check then take whatever is said with a grain of salt.
Make that a bag of salt.
Odd. Know nothing about it. Suspect there must be various degrees of corruption. Be nice to know. Guess it’s between 10 – 30% depending where you are on the planet and what your business is.
If I recall… In logic class… It was called slippery slope.
Slippery slopes are covered in rhetoric or propaganda or agit-prop,
Could it be related to the level of the service plan subscribed to? Yelp apparently blackmails businesses that don’t advertise by removing good reviews. Perhaps Alexa came up with an algorithm that is “more accurate” for customers with the their most expensive plan. About the Yelp technique:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3364742
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635
http://www.datalounge.com/cgi-bin/iowa/ajax.html?t=12380900#page:showThread,12380900
Well I’ve said it before to you that Alexa cannot be trusted for accurate statistics. They use indirect measurements to give an estimate on the traffic a website is receiving, where this is coming from, and what their audience is. At best you can use indirect methods to give an indication of what is going on, but even that cannot be trusted on.
The other detail also is that it’s quite easy to manipulate/pollute the data Alexa gathers. Though I do not yet know how their recent changes will affect this.
The only thing that I can say with certainty is that you shouldn’t rely on Alexa statistics, or any other statistics gathered through indirect measures. They all have some big disadvantages that make them unreliable compared to data gathered from direct measurements.
REPLY: Colin, as usual, you miss this real issue, due to your own biases against myself and WUWT. Alexa has been doing just fine for millions of websites, it’s the change now that is the issue. It can’t simply be explained away, even if you disagree with the previous data gathering methods. Just a reminder. You’re banned from commenting here, due to your previous thread disruptions spouting your bias, and some moderator accidentally let your comment through. So there is no need to reply. – Anthony
HA !!
Nothing can save CNN from bottoming out !!
Maybe the “New” system at Alexa allows leftists to fudge rankings like they do for google searches.
Oh god, please don’t cite WND. That makes this site’s credibility go down dramatically.
I have found over the last few years that leftist bias suffers from incredible NOBLE CAUSE CORRUPTION and knows NO limits, yes it runs very deep! Leftists will do anything for their cause, as long as they do not have to sacrifice much.
The left lies about everything, so why not this as well? Inflation, GDP, employment, IRS, Benghazi, fast and furious, Obamacare, yata, yata, yata…. If their lips are moving they are lying.
It’s really pretty simple, their recruitment process leads to a biased, not representative sample. When you do heavy recruiting on Puffington Host you will get a liberally biased sample. No one in the media industry takes Alexa seriously. Nielsen and Comscore are the only generally accepted measurement platforms.
You know all those inept reporters the MSM let go because they can’t sell enough of their reports to keep them employed? Well, probably Alexa hired some of them. Ergo, Alexa’s bad reporting of internet rankings.
John
Since the rank reflects a websites place RELATIVE to all other sites, if 5 thousand progressive sites were pushed up in rank significant then all sites they passed would see a 5k drop in their rank.
Something must be inflating a lot of progressive sites if the effect shows up even on sites in the top tier though, and it must be a very large boost. Not just +/- 500 visits.
i was wondering this too. Is it a huge influx of fake traffic to liberal websites? they liberals were found out to be sending tons of fake email to influence conservative reps and senators in 2010 on crucilal votes iirc. Fake twitter accts retweeting bs too.
I think we need to wait for five years worth of data before we can say for sure. Or ten years? Or Eighteen years? Or perhaps it will descend to zero by 2035?
If Alexa.com’s numbers can’t be trusted it would finish Alexa.
Serious question here. I have WUWT bookmarked on my browser and use it exclusively to access WUWT. Since I don’t use ‘google search’ or other search engines to get here what effect would/could that have on various ranking results?
Kinda looks like Mike’s trick. Mikey likes it.
Resistance is futile! You will be extrapolated!
Sarc》
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bc/Borg_Queen_2372.jpg
Here’s a reality check on just how fishy those numbers are – Alexa shows MSNBC’s rankings going up, when the New York Times has just published a piece on how MSNBC’s ratings just hit a new all time low.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/business/media/leaning-forward-msnbc-loses-ground-to-rival-cnn-.html?_r=0
“However the slide of MSNBC is especially dramatic. The Times reports that MSNBC averaged 392,000 key demo viewers per night in the first quarter of 2009. Last quarter that number was down to 125,000, representing a loss of two-thirds of their total audience.”
So, Alexa is trying to say that even though on-air viewership has just hit an All Time Low, somehow online page views are going up. I don’t think so.
It may be time for some entrepreneur to start a competing ranking service, since Alexa’s can apparently no longer be trusted.