After the Alexa update post, I was wondering just how Alexa top sites data compares to its main competitors – Compete and Quantcast. What is the most reliable source of data about sites’ traffic? Should we just check all the 3 if we want an adequate picture? I checked and here’s what I have found out.
Compete.com lists the following sites as top sites by traffic volume:
1Â Â Â Â google.com
2 Â Â Â yahoo.com
3 Â Â Â live.com
4 Â Â Â facebook.com
5 Â Â Â msn.com
6 Â Â Â ebay.com
7 Â Â Â youtube.com
8 Â Â Â wikipedia.org
9 Â Â Â amazon.com
10 Â Â Â microsoft.com
Quantcast.com lists pretty much the same sites though in slightly different order, save for Amazon that goes missing in its list and MySpace appearing instead:
Alexa’s Top Sites list has only 2 entries for Microsoft’s sites instead of 3 like the other two sources. Two new entries also appear – Blogger.com and the Chinese search engine Baidu:
-
Google
-
Yahoo!
-
YouTube
-
Facebook
-
Windows Live
-
Microsoft Network (MSN)
-
Wikipedia
-
Blogger.com
-
Myspace
-
Baidu.com
I guess the difference could be explained by different sources of data the 3 sites use (Alexa relies mainly on its toolbar while Compete gets the ISP and hosting data and Quantcast relies a lot on site owners adding its code to their sites a.k.a. “Quantifying” them)
But I’ve also found something proving an extra time how easily Alexa can be manipulated, at least in the short term. It has another list of sites called Hot URLs where it lists the sites with highest traffic at the moment, updated every 5 minutes. At the time I checked it, among usual suspects like Yahoo! News, Twitter or YouTube, I have noticed the following URL:
Make Money At Home Online http://*url obscured*
(but it was nothing more than just an IP – the person didn’t even bother to register a domain!)
– ranking as high as #8!
Comments
2 responses to “Top 10 Sites According to Different Sources”