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Author

Alexa

Alfred Molon

2007-06-25, 6:26 pm

Well, I just discovered Alexa. Is their data accurate? My site currently
ranks 98430.

The Alexa site mentions the ia_archiver bot. Currently it is disallowed
in my robots.txt. Should I allow it?
--

Alfred Molon
http://www.molon.de - Photos of Asia, Africa and Europe

GreyWyvern

2007-06-25, 6:26 pm

And lo, Alfred Molon didst speak in alt.www.webmaster:

> Well, I just discovered Alexa. Is their data accurate? My site currently
> ranks 98430.
>
> The Alexa site mentions the ia_archiver bot. Currently it is disallowed
> in my robots.txt. Should I allow it?

Alexa bases their info on people who download and use their toolbar while
surfing. I think they have agreements with makers of a few other toolbars
too. It's only as accurate as that sample size of users can get -
meaning, as you go down in the ranking, the standard deviation gets so
large as to make all the data below, say, rank 250,000 pretty much
entirely arbitrary.

The ia_archiver robot captures pages for the Wayback Machine
<http://web.archive.org/> I've been disallowing that bot for years and it
has not hurt my Alexa ranking. Not that my care what my Alexa ranking is
anyway.

Grey

--
The technical axiom that nothing is impossible sinisterly implies the
pitfall corollary that nothing is ridiculous.
- http://www.greywyvern.com/orca#search - Orca Search: Full-featured
spider and site-search engine

Auggie

2007-06-25, 6:26 pm

"Alfred Molon" <alfred_molonCANCEL@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.20ea36427ae9e18e98b589@news.supernews.com...
> Well, I just discovered Alexa. Is their data accurate? My site currently
> ranks 98430.
>
> The Alexa site mentions the ia_archiver bot. Currently it is disallowed
> in my robots.txt. Should I allow it?

This information on the Alexa website only tracks for users using the Alexa
toolbar.

Its hard to say how accurate the information is or how it rates in relation
to "the average web surfer".

Last summer my main website was ranked up around 32,000.... I just checked
now and its saying I am way down to almost 1,800,000

That sounds like a huge drop but despite what Alexa is saying, the traffic
to my website has increased by more than 25% per month compared to this time
last year.

SpaceGirl

2007-06-26, 6:19 am

On Jun 25, 10:22 pm, "Auggie" <Imperial.Pal...@Rome.It> wrote:
> "Alfred Molon" <alfred_molonCAN...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> news:MPG.20ea36427ae9e18e98b589@news.supernews.com...
>
>
>
> This information on the Alexa website only tracks for users using the Alexa
> toolbar.
>
> Its hard to say how accurate the information is or how it rates in relation
> to "the average web surfer".
>
> Last summer my main website was ranked up around 32,000.... I just checked
> now and its saying I am way down to almost 1,800,000
>
> That sounds like a huge drop but despite what Alexa is saying, the traffic
> to my website has increased by more than 25% per month compared to this time
> last year.

I wouldn't be surprised if numbers of people using 3rd party bars
(except for Google, perhaps) hasn't dropped over the past year or so.
With the increasing scares of Windows security holes, new releases of
Internet Explorer and FireFox, people are maybe becoming more cautious
in installing 3rd party things into their browsers...? So perhaps
Alexa's stats are becoming more and more irrelevant (well they never
were THAT relevant anyway).