Alexa steps

If you scroll down to the tootoo posting from the other day, you'll see a little exchange of thoughts on inadequacy of Alexa.com rankings. I suspect that I know where Anon is based and who he/she works for; Alexa really gets up their nose.

Anyway, what I wanted to show you was the odd steps and undulations which appear in almost everybody's Alexa.com rankings. Explain them to me if you can: Alexa relies on an installed toolbar and the thinking from those who like to dump on it is that, if you can get enough of your friends (or staff) to install this toolbar, you can game the results. Maybe. That still doesn't explain to me the undulations.

So, here goes. First we see Alibaba.com for the past three months. The percentage "reach" figure refers to Alexa's estimate of the percentage of global internet users (1,114,274,426 according to Internetworldstats.com):


Here, then is Global Sources:


...and, finally, tootoo.com:

Make of that what you will. I'm really interested in anybody's theories about this. The tootoo.com site is quite new. It looks as though, at the beginning of April, somebody either gave up caring or took the toolbar off their site. What do you think? It's hard to ignore the fact that the graph dips to zero on no fewer than 3 occasions.