I Was Wrong About Alexa
Posted at 6:24 pm on March 26th, 2007 by Ron in Statsaholic |I guess I was wrong about Alexa… turns out they are willing to turn off their traffic graphs to the entire internet, with the exception of their own site. Statsaholic’s graphs disappeared a few minutes ago, around 6:00 pm Pacific, and no amount of referrer hacking will bring them back up.
Wonder what the users of Alexa’s own (now broken) widgets think about this? Will it be only a temporary outage? Are they simply toying with me?
If you want to continue using Statsaholic, you can turn off your browser’s referrers by using Firefox with Chris Pederick’s excellent Web Developer extension.
UPDATE 8:56 pm — the graphs are back up on Statsaholic. Hmmmm.
UPDATE 10:15 pm — the graphs are back down.
March 26th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I know one thing, Alexa is not accurate, and has not updated for over three weeks for my domain. Our server stats show massive increases in traffic, but Alexa has our rankings going down not up. I used to respect Alexa, and take it for what it is, but they seem to be manipulating their stats results constantly, and not updating some sites while updating others. With this Statsaholic fiasco that I just found out about, it’s even harder to take Alexa seriously.
March 26th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Sorry to hear about Alexa cutting you off.
It was a bit ballsy to go with their name, but I think you gave them a lot of attribution and credit. The key thing is that I agree that they should be willing to allow the dev community access to the graphing engine - just like they allow access to the other services. And access does not necessarily have to be for free…just at a fair price that recognizes their serving and development costs.
It is an interesting “2.0″ issue - at what point do successful mashups fail because the big guy says enough.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Is it possible to make a greasemonkey script that changes the referrer header or turns it off just for a few sites?
Alternatively, could you use a greasemonkey script to change the referrer header completely?
March 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am
@Matt - good idea, but I think it’s even simpler than a GM script. In Firefox, do an about:config in the address field, then add or edit the config property called “network.http.sendRefererHeader”, setting it to an integer value of 0.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:02 am
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March 28th, 2007 at 3:26 am
My Alexa stats went down to 0 while my traffic has had a 200% increase in the last two days.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
[...] appears that Alexa has shut off their traffic graphs on all the websites of the world, with the exception [...]