| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
Hidden in plain sight (revisited)
Ten months ago, the Rebel Website’s editor “Rebel of Oz” published an article exposing the manipulations performed by leading website ranking firm Alexa for the purpose of reducing the search engine ranking of dissident websites. (http://therebel.website/en/editorial/753917-hidden-in-plain-sight) After recently changing the domain name of the Rebel Website from therebel.org to therebel.website, Rebel of Oz revisited the matter. Here’s what he has found.
Appendix:
I must admit I had expected some kind of response. Just like Alexa had responded to my original article after 3-4 months by changing its formular so that it discriminates against all dissident websites, including Infowars, David Duke and Jim Stone, I had expected that they will react by discriminating less ‘right in your face’, maybe not immediately, but after pondering for a while over how to better hide it. However, they reacted in less than 24 hours, maybe because I contacted them with a link to this article and video.
Here’s is my latest Alexa ranking figure available the night before I posted the article and video.
24 hours later, just half a day after publishing the article, that number dropped.
Not really an unusually high drop, but what’s strange about it is that it goes totally against the trend. Since the Global Alexa Rank is based on the last 3 months average and I have only renamed the site and resubscribed to Alexa just before Christmas, my Alexa Rank should go up, up, up for the next 2.5 months. Now let’s compare the Alexa ranking for therebel.website to my server stats of this month.
Wow, the visitor numbers went up and not down on the day in question, January 8. Even if Alexa’s days don’t exactly overlap with my server stats days, although I’ve configured my Alexa settings to coincide with my server time, the numbers on the 9th were still much higher than the fives days preceding the 8th, so the Alexa rank for that day should be still up and not down.
I don’t know what’s wrong with Alexa. They must be thinking we are completely stupid to not be able to work out how they are manipulating their numbers. Keep it up, Alexa, the more you’re messing with me, the more you’ll get exposed. You guys suck.
