Monday, February 19th, 2007, 12:10 pm
Alexa Flatters Windows-oriented Web Sites
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VER the years, my love-hate relationship with Alexa has transformed into a hate-hate relationship. As many people exploit an already-fragile and susceptible-to-abuse system, Alexa traffic ranks usually lie.
I still remember the time when I discovered Alexa ranks. I soon discovered mistakes in their approach. Then, when Microsoft made its predatory deal with A9, Firefox got excluded from Alexa’s figures.
Months afterwards, as Alexa gained attraction and people treated it as though it really gauged traffic reliably, more Webmasters abused it. Vanity led to greed. Alexa began to lie more than ever before. Even Netcraft’s figures, which are not quite as famous as Alexa, have bcome more reasonable over time. Here is a new blog item that says much more on the topic.
If you have a site which is mostly for an audience of Mac users or maybe a site which attracts Linux users or even one which has something to do with open source software, you could have a very low percentage of your audience using Internet Explorer. Mac users really don’t have an IE option at this point and many people just don’t use it because of security risks.
Of course, Alexa only collects data from Internet Explorer. I think this sums it all up rather nicely.
