Some links on the state of webstats
More in follow-up to my post on all of it being a damned lie:
I'm not shocked, but I am disappointed. I'm hoping that this discussion spreads past our echo chamber so we can start getting real.
- Silicon Beat discusses how broken webstats are;
- Which led me to this article by WebAnalyticsBook that explains why the discrepancy (that none of them use 'actual' traffic numbers);
- Which led me to a little $34.95 program that can boost your Alexa ratings
I'm not shocked, but I am disappointed. I'm hoping that this discussion spreads past our echo chamber so we can start getting real.
3 Comments:
I'm not surprised. It was only a matter of time before someone figured how to hack the system. When numbers are counted rather than value, this is what happens.
whoah
Disclaimer: I work for Alexa (an Amazon subsidiary) but I am not speaking on behalf of my company. The following are my own personal opinions based on personal experience.
AlexaBooster is just a scam. There are a lot of people out there that promise to do this or do that but the fact is that computers just don't surf the web the way humans do. They are either too random or too statistical, both of which we can detect. In grad school I took a class from
that dealt with the subject of complexity; the complexity of the behavior doesn't matter, it's the complexity of the description.
Computers pretending to be humans have a very short behavior description length compared to humans pretending to be surfers. We can (and do) detect that and disregard rankings accordingly. One thing that most people don't realize is that Alexa deals with Unique Visitors (based on IPs and sessions) per Site per Day, not raw numbers of hits.
For anyone that thinks AlexaBooster isn't a scam, I have some snakeoil for sale. Also, a bridge.
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