Posted on 06/01/2003 9:35:15 AM PDT by wotan
Lew Rockwell's Libertarian website has roared past Free Republic in recent weeks.
Lew Rockwell has published comparative traffic trends for Lew Rockwell and its competition here.
I checked the figures directly at www.alexa.com. They appear accurate.
Any ideas why?
I didn't see any figures to compare at the links you gave so I can't comment on that. Post links to the figures.
There are graphs for traffic trends. The presentation is quite clear.
Can't you read a graph?
Post the graphs here.
Maybe you should upgrade.
If you look at the Lew Rockwell homepage you will see that they have an Alexa referral box on it. The Alexa rating system works only for Browsers with the Alexa Toolbar installed. The Alexa spyware collects surfing data on those browsers with the toolbar installed. Currently the Toolbar only works with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Lew Rockwell hypes the Alexa Rating by featuring it on his hompage and often mentioning his ratings as the example you have linked. His users are more likely to use the Tool Bar offered by Alexa if for no other reason than they are aware it exists, which would not be typically true of the other sites he shows in the comparisons he listed.
Alexa ratings my be relevant comparisons for sites that do not make prominant reference to Alexa and thereby Skew the ratings upward. Also, I don't think he is doing his readers any favors by leading them to a toolbar that loads spyware on their computers.
According to the Alexa "Technology" page the traffic ratings are based on snapshots they take while web-crawling:
"Alexa is continually crawling all publicly available web sites to create a series of snapshots of the Web.I don't see any indication the toolbar is used for gathering traffic ranking statistics, and it seems unlikely since you don't need a toolbar to web-crawl (what Google and others do)....
By analyzing the data we receive from our updated snapshots of the Web, we can tell our users how their traffic ranks in comparison to other web sites and how many other sites link to that site."
Do you have information from somewhere else that contradicts this?
Anti-bubba's reply is pretty thorough, the "snapshots" are of their toolbar users activity.
It's curious though:
FR is #1 in their activism category, #3 in politics, #13 in society (which includes politics).
Lewrockwell doesn't make it on to any of those lists, nor does it make it into the top five of libertarianism or objectivism sites.
I wonder what category Alexa lists them under.
Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.
What is Traffic Rank? The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter...."
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