How easy is it to Manipulate Web Statistics Services?
Over the next couple of weeks I’m doing an experiment to see if it possible to “Game” the Alexa website ranking service. Alexa is a service which aims to rank websites by traffic and popularity.
Prevously I described Alexa as telling you “how popular your website is among Geeks wearing Y-Fronts“.
Now I am going to do an experiment to see how robust these measures are.
Experimenting on Alexa
Several times a week I will be highlighting and linking to articles from the activist websites for the 3 main political parties, and for the main party’s websites themselves.
The three figures are the daily, weekly average and quarterly average rankings among all sites on the internet:
- Conservative Home. Current Alexa rankings (daily: 98625, weekly: 194,353, quarterly: 192,019).
- Labour Home. Current Alexa ranking (daily: n/a too low, weekly: 512,024, quarterly: 527,475).
- Lib Dem Voice. Current Alexa ranking (daily: n/a too low, weekly: 195,084, quarterly: 295,256).
- Conservative Party. Current Alexa rankings (daily: n/a too low, weekly: 254,762, quarterly: 178,305).
- Labour Party. Current Alexa rankings (daily: n/a too low, weekly:131,920, quarterly: 148,272).
- Lib Dem party. Current Alexa rankings (daily: n/a too low, weekly: 377,557, quarterly: 204,473).
My contention is that I can boost the Alexa ranking of these websites significantly by sending them a couple of visitors a day (which is all they will get from a blog with my levels of traffic <g>).
I’m going to need a couple of people to click on each article to visit the websites, and that should do it. I’ll be visiting each article once myself - Alexa only counts one per day anyway.
Articles for Today
- Conservative Home has an article about social mobility.
- Labour Home is fulminating about Gordon Brown’s aim to link schools to businesses.
- Lib Dem Voice is discussing Harriet Harman’s win of the Labour Deputy Leadership.
- The Conservative Party have NHS Autonomy as their top story.
- The Labour Party have the full text of Gordon Brown’s speech to accept the Labour Leadership.
- The Lib Dem Party are taling about the EU agreement.
- And I note that Recess Monkey is suffering with an Alexa rank of 685,955. Let’s bump him up a bit.
Alexa Ranking Graphs
The Alexa ranking graphs only show the top 100,000 sites, so at present these sites hardly show. For example:
Prize Competition
I’ll buy a bottle of champagne for anyone who can get one of the major parties to cite an increase in Alexa rankings as evidence of a successful website during this experiment.
Tags: alexa, web rankings, recess monkey, conservativehome, labourhome, libdemvoice, conservative party, liberal democrat party, labour party, web statistics, manipulate alexa[tags]alexa, web rankings, recess monkey, conservativehome, labourhome, libdemvoice, conservative party, liberal democrat party, labour party, web statistics, manipulate alexa[/tags]
Categories: 100 Days to Better Blogging, Defogging Blogging, Internet / Technical, Political Blogging
I don’t understand those stats, how can CH’s weekly and monthly hits be lower than LabourHome’s - especially if their daily ratings were too low to be recorded!
And why would CH’s quarterly hits (which are far higher than that) be roughly the same as its weekly hits?
Aha, Sam.
It’s not hits - it’s a ranking (i.e., lower is better) of all websites in the world based on the sites visited by people who use the Alexa toolbar. This sample is heavily biassed to Geeks, Americans and South Asians (India, Singapore etc.).
I’m aiming to show just how idiotic this particular statistic is - and hopefully get people to be a bit more cynical and careful about web stats in general.
Ironically, a number of ad-networks set their payment levels partly on Alexa stats.
If you want a number to compare to, I am running at about 500 uniques and 2000 page views a day (according to my server logs) and my 3-month average Alexa rank is 125,000 and going up by about 5000 a week. My rank yesterday was 78,000. I do well here because a i get some technology traffic as well as political.
Hope that helps a bit.