Recently, Credit Suisse issued an investment report and gave a Hong Kong stock, Alibaba.com a ”overweight” rating and raise the target price to $23.7. The reason is because pageviews of alibaba had been increased, according to Alexa.com

For search engine optimizers, all know that alexa measures data based on their users. So, the traffic ranking could have bias. The following is extracted from alexa.com:

”A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site.”

Alibaba.com serves b2b market. In fact, I wonder how many business users install and use alexa toolbar in their office computer. How come a very big investment bank can use Alexa traffic ranking as a basis to make investment recommendation? How can we trust those investment report?

Such a big investment bank can misunderstand and misuse of Alexa data, and it explains why some SEO companies can make use of Alexa traffic ranking and show their clients how good they are and ask clients to trust them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under SEO, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.