Alexa? We can do better.

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading into SEO & popular rankings of the various authorities on these things. It seems a good deal of the venues that rely on these numbers mostly look at Alexa data. The problem with this data, is it’s discriminatory and skewed. There are other alternatives that are accurate, unbiased, and don’t imply that the folks they’re collecting this data for are simpletons.

MY post is in response to Garry Conn’s post about it. I started this as a comment, and then got long winded, thus, my “five readers” get to read it too!

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In addition to requiring a site owner to use the Alexa toolbar, they are also requiring us to use a browser that supports said toolbar. Namely I.E. w/ Windows. What about other operating systems and browsers?

I’m a firefox user; almost exclusively, these days. I haven’t found a plugin that sends traffic data BACK to Alexa. They can REPORT Alexa data, but they have no effect on creating it.

I also resent that Alexa implies that site & blog owners are not sophisticated enough to properly understand server logs. Granted, the web has a bit of a learning curve, but it CAN be learned. Those that WANT to learn how to understand traffic logs, SEO, and other data – WILL learn it.

And those that don’t… They probably don’t care how Alexa data is calculated, either.

Of course they are saying their toolbar is the best; it’s part of marketing. But what they’re leaving out of their pitch, is everyone who uses Mac, Linux, Unix, Safarri, Firefox, and any other non-Microsoft product – their traffic just doesn’t count. That sounds quite a bit like discrimination & anti-trust violation, to me.

Perhaps the questions we need to ask, are of TLA, ReviewMe & their ilk. Why rely so heavily on such a biased system? Why not use Google Analytics, or other non-biased diagnostics?

There’s got to be a better way to make money online using a system where ALL traffic, from all users, with all platforms & browsers count.