Rank Stupidity

You know, I had a good ranting post planned for today, but an enforced round-trip to bloody Cardiff yesterday has left me completely knackered and uninspired. The gist of it was going to be about the utter inaccuracy of Alexa as a meaningful measure of web traffic to individual sites. For a couple of weeks now it has shown The Sleaze's traffic dropping like a stone when, in reality, it has been moving in the opposite direction (at least, according to every measure of web traffic I use). From there, I was going to going to point out that all Alexa actually does is tell you how the number of people using the Alexa toolbar visiting your site compares to the number of people using the Alexa toolbar visiting other people's sites. Then I was going to question exactly how representative of web users in general Alexa toolbar users are - how many people do you know who have that toolbar installed? (None, in my case). Then I was going to rant about how too many idiots still think that Alexa rankings mean something and try to judge the popularity and, by extension, the worth, of your site by them.

I was then going to ask whether there was any way an individual web owner could get their site removed from Alexa - I've searched, but have never found a way of doing this. My rationale for this was to be that by presenting misleading data about the supposed popularity of The Sleaze, it was damaging the site's reputation. I'd planned to round this rant off by going on about how shit many of these we applications and communities which purport to exist for the promotion of user's sites actually are, using as an example Blogcatalog, which rejected this blog on the basis that it couldn't find the site when it tried to verify it. This, despite the fact that there had been no outages at Blogger during this period. What utter shit - I was going to say, if they're that inefficient, they can go fuck themselves. However, I'm just too tired to bother. Oh, and Alexa's ranking for The Sleaze has mysteriously jumped back up, so I can't really complain about them now, can I?