Considering how wrong Alexa is, I’ve wondered for a long time who would be the first one to sue Alexa for an incorrect ranking. For sites that drive revenue from advertising, an incorrect ranking can impact their direct ability to generate revenue.

Alexa changed their ranking model back in April and since then everything has gone downhill for most sites I track. Currently CN has a 1-week average rank of 194,000 while my other site HTMLCenter has a rank of 78,000. There’s only one issue, CN has 6-10x more traffic on average than HTMLCenter does.

Here are some additional thoughts in my Alexa video:

Daniel Scocco compared 15 Web sites using Alexa, Compete and Google Trends. It’s interesting to see just how off Alexa is overall. Andy Beard believes that Alexa is no longer counting social media traffic and that’s why we have seen even more ranking drops for sites that rely on social media traffic. I would tend to agree with Andy but CN has very little social media traffic – we had one digg frontpage in the last 60 days.

If Alexa is removing social media traffic (they haven’t said anything yet about this latest change), that’s an excellent step forward. I’ve said before that just because a site has more raw pageviews than another, doesn’t mean it’s worth anything more – especially if they are gaming the social media sites. But I am not convinced Alexa has made this change.

I’ve tried sending emails to Alexa, but I have never received a reply. Which is so unlike Amazon considering how responsive and fast they are to customer service emails. It’s almost like Bezos ignores Alexa for some unknown reason.

Perhaps it’s finally time to turn off Alexa.

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.

CN dropped from ~25,000 to ~76,000 which is a shocking drop of 51,000 spots. I actually believe this is a huge mistake and is the highest drop I’ve seen so far. Yet our sister site, HTMLCenter actually moved up about 30,000 spots and now sits at ~95,000. The kicker is this: HTMLCenter currently has 15% of the traffic that CN has.

Other sites that have reported in on ranking changes:

• modernmom.com gained 30,000 spots
• CLRSearch.com gained 80,000 spots
• Sleep.fm moved up 125,000 spots and they are in private beta!

Alexa staff, if you are reading this – I’d love a chat with you even if it’s off the record.

I’d like to see Alexa stand up and state what the sources they are using to rank sites.

Compete and Quantcast appear to be eating Alexa’s lunch as both services are offering more than just a ratings service. For example, Compete regularly provides industry analysis. The truth is that every single rankings service is semi-accurate, none of them should be taken as a final measure.

Some examples of the shifts:

• CenterNetworks lost 50,000 spots – the biggest drop I’ve seen so far
• AlleyInsider kept their ranking
• Techcrunch dropped about 400 spots
• Mashable seemed to pick up a few spots
• ReadWriteWeb kept their ranking

If you are a media buyer and you are making decisions solely based on an Alexa chart (I know you are out there, I’ve seen it), you deserve to lose your shirt. And if any Web agency pitches you on a media buy and shows Alexa charts, fire them immediately. No single ratings source should be used for a media buy, especially not today in this social media world. Check out my article on why you should never bring Alexa to a fight.

Update: It also looks like Alexa has removed the 125 pixel ads they were selling and replaced them with traditional run-of-network banners. I heard from a couple of advertisers in the 125 pixel ads that they were very poor performing placements. Which to be honest was a shock given how popular Alexa is – I thought the ads would do quite well.

Alexa

We wrote about some of the issues with Alexa last year and at least pushed them to change "Today" to "Yesterday". I am not sure what is up as to why the charts and numbers haven’t been updated but they either need to get the engine running or at least post a blog update as to why there is a delay. Sadly many bloggers and journalists quote Alexa stats in their writing and could be quoting nearly week-old stats!

With newer services like Compete and Quantcast and mega-services Hitwise and comScore growing every day, I still don’t understand why Amazon hasn’t never put any investment or resources into rebuilding Alexa to be something that we can trust and rely on. With all of the toolbars installed worldwide, the revenue driven to Amazon via the toolbars should be a sign that Alexa could be something. Maybe it’s just a dream.

Then we received Alexa and later on sites like Compete and Quantcast. Each one has its pros and cons, though most agree that Alexa is the worst of the bunch. Quantcast has the most promise of a real comparison because they let you put the tracking code directly on your site or blog. But the issue with Quantcast is this: why should I put Quantcast on my site, when my competitors don’t and they may wind up overreporting because they take Quantcast’s default numbers.

Last night I had dinner with a great group of people, mostly fashion bloggers, and we discussed widgets for a bit. The big issue with widgets and widget advertising is how will reporting and analytics work. Without a strong reporting engine, sell-in to agencies will be very difficult. It’s easy to look at traditional Web ads on site A and site B and see which one performs better. But what about with widgets? How do you compare effectiveness?

Last night, Mike Arrington posted an article about white-label social networking company Flux and their apparent huge increase in traffic. A chart from comScore shows an enormous increase in traffic for Flux from November 2007 forward. Arrington suggests that the traffic increase is due to, "Flux … had the benefit of not only Viacom’s money but also their brands – at launch hundreds of Viacom properties launched Flux social networks, including their MTV brands."

I wanted to post a reply straight away but had to leave for dinner. The question about the traffic increase is whether it comes from a Viacom push or whether it comes from Flux’s widget strategy? Back in November, TechCrunch wrote about Flux opening up their platform. At that time, they installed the widget displayed below. Not sure if it was a paid widget like the HP printing one, but in any event, did loads on that widget help to boost Flux’s traffic? The widget loads a Javascript on flux.com along with what looks like a customized image for TC for the Flux share. Did either of these hits register to comScore? Now take this share widget, and place it on 200 other sites. If the hit counted, now you get an idea on how quickly traffic can build for Flux. Unlike a normal widget, the issue with these loads (if counted) is that very few (if any) ever visited Flux via clicking the share button.

While I can’t give you 100% proof that this is what’s happening and I certainly hope that it isn’t, this discussion is the most recent example of why we need a real comparison engine. One that can properly handle today’s technologies.

When I met with KickApps to discuss their latest release we discussed comparisons to Ning. It’s not easy to compare KickApps to Ning in that KA isn’t hosted on kickapps.com whereas Ning hosts all of their social networks on ning.com.

The real issue is when advertisers, public relations teams, writers, journalists, etc., make decisions based on numbers they read on one of the current comparison engines alone. I’ve seen it hundreds of times over the past decade, especially with agencies pitching a site to advertise on. Of course, the site in the lead is happy to point you to one of the current comparison engines to show off how great they are. Perhaps there is a startup opportunity here. Not as sexy as a Facebook poke app, but could be very valuable to the industry at large.

1. Is Mahalo a clone of Hakia Gallery?
2. Corporate social tool usage
3. Where does Mahalo get their high Alexa ranking from?
4. Positive employee feedback and encouragement from management

Mahalo: A Hakia Clone?

Last week I met with semantic search engine Hakia.  One of the features they demo’ed to me is the "Hakia Gallery". The Gallery is a partially human-edited results for over several thousand results. The immediate reaction I had was "Is Mahalo a Hakia clone?" – do a search for cancer on both Hakia and Mahalo to see an example. Mahalo probably wins a point on design but gives up multiple points as the Hakia Gallery uses some human and some computer to create a much more robust page. So is Mahalo a clone? We already know that Jason knows how to clone… see Netscape.

Update: Based on my offline emails with Jason regarding this section, here is my clarification. I am in no way suggesting that Mahalo lifted any design elements from Hakia. I am merely noting that the pages are similar. I think Mahalo’s design is easier on the eyes and Hakia’s technology appears better by combining human-edited results plus their search technology. Also, please note that the link to Netscape being a Digg clone goes to TechCrunch.

Mahalo’s social media usage

One of the ways Mahalo is getting traffic is by leveraging their employees and contractors to submit and vote up stories on the social media sites. Here is an example post on the news group:

When I first came across this, I was completely outraged. How could a CEO ask his or her employees to digg, reddit, stumble, scape a story to get it on the front page. It’s one thing to ask some buddies to help out with a digg, but for a corporation to ask their employees to do this, just seemed wrong, very wrong.

I decided to hold off posting about this as I wanted to really think about it. And here is the conclusion I came to. It’s ok in moderation. I guess there is no difference to this type of cheerleading as if Ford asked their employees to pass out Ford info as they walk in a park. Jason isn’t forcing the employees to vote, nor is he asking for positive votes. As Mahalo grows in number of employees/contractors, we will see more Mahalo stories hit the front page. I do wonder, if the social sites were all "corporate run" would the largest corporations always make the front page of x site?

Investigating Mahalo’s Alexa ranking

Jason has touted his Alexa ranking (for whatever its worth, which is basically nil) all over the Internet, mostly at Valleywag. And currently Mahalo sits at a rank of 5,267 for the 3-month average and an awesome 3,256 for last week. I decided to put on my Columbo analytics hat and have a look deeper (ok, only as deep as Alexa goes!). Here is the chart of number of pageviews and what parts of the Mahalo site are generating the traffic:

Ten pageviews per visitor – who wouldn’t love that! And then we see where the traffic is coming from. Almost half of the traffic is to internal, non-public sections of Mahalo. Greenhouse is the section of the site where the "guides" work on creating the pages that appear on Mahalo. And this means that at least a portion of the guides are using the Alexa toolbar. When you enter the Greenhouse, you search for the terms that you might want to write a results-page for. But it might take you 20 searches to find a page that isn’t created already. Hence the 9.8 pageviews per visitor!

Now back to that 5,267 ranking. Since we know that ~50% of the traffic is to internal sections and we know that the majority of views are from guides, we can apply this to the other ~50 of the traffic that is going to the main Mahalo.com site. In essence, the majority of the traffic to Mahalo is actually internal, employee traffic! I wonder what their ranking would be if this was removed. My HP10B++ estimates it to be in the 60-80k range.

Jason is smart, very smart. Get your employees to use a publicly available tool and over time, as you increase employees, you increase monetizable page views. Even if it’s not on his radar today, it should be. Imagine if you had 1 million page views, and your employees added another 3 million creating pages to support the other 1 million. To the average Internet marketer (i.e. most of the ones I have dealt with), that’s 4 million page views to buy/sell! Genius!

Employee Encouragement

The last part of this conversation is around employee encouragement and feedback. Jason has done a great job here. Since Jason is so public online, it’s easy to tell when he is having a bad day. I have watched him throw a fit on x person or y site and just a few minutes later congratulate the guides on Mahalo. It’s so critical to give your employees the encouragement they need to be satisfied. Writing search pages is probably about as boring (most times) as watching paint dry.

But if you can get people excited about the work they are doing, they will feel better about it. I hope this post encourages Jason to talk about employee encouragement in the Web worker field. I have managed teams for years now and it’s easy to walk over to someone’s desk and tell them how great a job they did. But online where your workers are spread out, it’s not as easy. Might be a great niche there for someone to blog about!

Yesterday Owen Thomas at Valleywag used Alexa to point out how poorly Mahalo is doing. As most of you know I am not a fan of Mahalo. But using Alexa to try to make Mahalo appear a joke is plain stupid. All it does is draw more attention to Mahalo. There are plenty of other ways to pick on Mahalo. :)

What the chart that Owen embedded shows is the topic I discussed last week that the initial "celebuzz" can only take one only so far. Now it's up to the product and Jason to get the buzz to continue and to grow.

The issue with using Alexa to do battle with is a topic we have discussed numerous times on CN. There is so much more that is wrong with Alexa than is right. While Alexa can sometimes be used as a rough guide for tech only sites, I would never use it in a battle.

Services such as Hitwise and Comscore are also flawed but much typically provide more accurate results than Alexa. Quantcast will also be a player as more sites signup to be "Quantified." I can only guess that sometime in the near future Google Analytics will offer a way to share your metrics. Once this happens we may see an Alexa replacement that "may" serve some value.

Anyway, after checking Quantcast's ranking for Cn, I popped over to the highly buzzed-about site Compete. Surely they will be pretty close right? Nope. Compete shows a rank of 202,430 with 6,000 visitors in April 2007. Blech. I also note that Compete now links over to AboutUs.org for more information. Double Blech.

And last but certainly not least, let's check Alexa. Certainly a company with a slogan of, "The Web Information Company" must have it right. They show Cn with a current rank of 26,970.

I know this is a simple comparison but it shows that these Web reporting applications are clearly not 100% correct and I still say the same thing I have said since the late '90s. Which is that I don't trust them for making deals. Alexa and Quantcast appear to be close but does that mean they are right? Compete seems the furthest off, especially with their monthly user count which is absolutely not correct.

Why do these inaccuracies affect Cn in the wallet? Because potential advertisers might check these sites and see that Cn has lower traffic numbers than I quote to them. Will we ever see lawsuits by companies who are affected by poor ranking and public analytics apps? I am guessing, yes.

Check our previous coverage of Quantcast, Compete and Alexa.