In a previous post I mentioned that one of my sites, XML-Sitemaps according to Alexa was the 6707th most popular website in the world. Now I know this isn’t true as I know exactly how many visitors this site gets a day. I also have other websites which receive 5 x the amount of daily visitors yet rank between 50,000 and 60,000.

So why is my site with less visitors showing such popularity? My guess would be that the majority of people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed which collects the data are webmasters who are interested in seeing what their Alexa rank is. As my site XML-Sitemaps is geared towards webmasters this really makes a nonsense of the figures quoted as it isn’t representative of your average surfer.

Apart from the Alexa Rank figures the toolbar provides a convenient search box so you can search the internet without having to go to Google, etc, first. Now this used to be okay when Alexa was using search results powered by Google but recently they changed and now there search results are powered by Windows Live. If there was ever a reason to delete the Alexa Toolbar this would be it.

I’m sorry but Windows Live as a search engine just isn’t cutting it for me. I’m sure they are trying hard but for me its a waste of time. I’ll give you an example:

Searching for “free ringtones” (without the quotes) 5 of the top 10 results (including the top 2) are disabled blogger accounts presumably as they were spam pages designed to fool search engines, another 1 is a disabled homestead page, presumably disabled for the same reason as the blogger pages, the 3rd result is another disabled domain which says “Domain deleted - reason abuse”, another 2 are made for adverts pages which only have adverts on which you can click which just leaves 1 genuine website left.

At least with Google generally I find at least 9 of the top 10 results are genuine sites and the ones that do slip through are normally removed quite quickly.

It makes you wonder how many people will now delete their Alexa Toolbar because of this. It might be the only people left using it are the webmasters to check on their Alexa rank which is only going to make their figures even more unrepresentative of the general surfers.

Posted in Search Engines, Rants & Raves