Why I Don't Trust Alexa

Alexa today rammed me in (comparatively speaking) the stratosphere of the Internet, the all important "top 100,000). My page rank for Sept. 5 was a exospheric 73,926!

This is why I don't trust Alexa.

Sure my page hits have been high for the past few days, because of widespread pickup of my blog item on Overstock.com being banned by Wikipedia. But I've had higher days that did not register on the Alexa scale.

I thnk that is because I was picked up by blog aggregators serving techies, such as techmeme.com and mashable.com, and apparently their users are more apt than others to have the Alexa toolbar.

Alexa ratings are of little value for a blog, as little hobby bloggies like this one don't use 'em to sell advertising. Still, this sort of thing makes me wonder just how valuable Alexa rankings are. Personally I think that Technorati, which measures blogs by their links, is probably more reliable as an external indicator of readership.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.



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