Alexa Incorrectly Figures If It Works For Twitter, It Could Work For Them

Aah, Alexa - the statistics service that told us last month that they fixed themselves -- our tests indicated they weren't more accurate than before.

Back in February we reported that Alexa had "stopped counting" for nearly 10 days. I wondered if anyone actually cared that the service stopped updating as no one was talking about it. Today, Duncan Riley reports that once again they have stopped counting. The graphs last updated on May 19th, nearly 10 days ago. The graphic to the right displays what I see when I browse Alexa's data. Duncan also notes that Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million.

It does appear that the numbers in the charts might be updating - the CN rank appears to continue to drop though our traffic hasn't dropped. Of all of the sites I tested, we lost the largest number of slots when they changed their ranking process - nearly 90,000 slots!

Alexa's blog hasn't been updated in a week and there's no status blog. Maybe they see that with Twitter, outages get them more buzz... who knows but I'd prefer that Alexa post a notice that the service is not functioning correctly. Sadly many marketers and ad agencies still use Alexa to help them base marketing and advertising decisions on.

C'mon Alexa, we give you chance after chance - fix it or shut it down until you do so.