Comments on: I Was Wrong About Alexa

By: Fix To Block Referer For Alexa Graphs Working on Statsaholic » D’ Technology Weblog — Technology, Blogging, Gadgets, Fashion, Life Style.

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 22:37:56 +0000

[...] appears that Alexa has shut off their traffic graphs on all the websites of the world, with the exception [...]

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:26:42 +0000

My Alexa stats went down to 0 while my traffic has had a 200% increase in the last two days.

By: 10-second Fix: Block Your Referer to Keep Alexa Graphs Working on Statsaholic and Everywhere Else » RonHornbaker.com

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:02:31 +0000

[...] contact « I Was Wrong About Alexa [...]

By: Ron

Ron — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:34:00 +0000

@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.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:04:21 +0000

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?

By: Tom McGovern

Tom McGovern — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 04:36:38 +0000

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.

By: MyGolfBuddy

MyGolfBuddy — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:44:15 +0000

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.