Being Internet Explorer-centric leaves out legions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and other browser users, and distorts how some sites are perceived in terms of traffic.
The search community has a lot of love for Alexa. An outage at the site causes webmasters and marketers to fret until it returns online. Like many things in life, Alexa does not enjoy universal love. Its critics see value in alternatives, and a need for Amazon to spur its Alexa unit to make some changes, the browser requirement among them.
The IE6 or 7 requirement hits Apple-related sites particularly hard. Josh Pigford at SpottingWalrus (he also created The Apple Blog) ripped the Windows requirement as being especially detrimental:
“Who cares?”, you might ask. Despite Apple only having a little over 6% of the market share, that’s still literally millions and millions of users browsing habits in a significant demographic that are being ignored.
He goes on to suggest switching to alternatives like Compete, Hitwise, and comScore. The problem is that while Compete is free, the other two charge for their data services, a likely obstacle in the SMB market. Paul Stamatiou recounted an Alexa comparison he did between his site and John Chow’s.
What should have been a roughly equal assessment instead barely registered Stamatiou’s statistics. “Alexa shows some wildly inaccurate information, but to Alexa’s knowledge that is correct,” he wrote. Unless companies that rely on Alexa data stop doing so and force it to change its model, the problems with their data will persist. —
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