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Alexa
By maurizio | May 9, 2007
Alexa is using some weird way to stop people crawling their site.
For example, if I look for information about my blog I clearly see this:
Traffic Rank for nafurai.com: 1,973,765
If I try to copy&paste with Firefox I get this:
Traffic Rank for nafurai.com: 189,97423,765
Pretty different, eh?
So I decided to look at the code.. ( I removed the ad Alexa put there..)
<a href="http://XXXXXXXX"><span class="descBold">1<span class="c1ae">89</span><span class="cc6a">,9</span>7<span class="c994">42</span><span class="c964">3,</span><span class="c37a">76</span><span class="cdf6">5</span>
As you can see, they are using some dumb way to stop people. Well..stop is a big word. You just need to understand what’s happening. And it’s not that difficult. Alexa is not showing all the object you see on the code. How? By putting rules like this one on the CSS:
.c12d {
display: none
}
Of course if you really want to use Alexa’s data by crawling the site, you will not be stopped by stupid things like that. I can write a piece of code that shows your alexa stats in just a couple of minutes..
Topics: Programming | 3 Comments »
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May 9th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Yeah, my Alexa ranking is rising.
Why wouldn’t they want people crawling their site?
Like the Google-bots and spiders, you mean?
Would this improve our rankings if Alexa was crawled?
I’ll bet this post could get a lot of Diggs…
May 9th, 2007 at 10:01 am
They don’t want to be crawled because they sell those informations. So if you are on the cheap and you have enough patience to wait the crawls, you can have a lot of information for free. Otherwise you have to pay 0.00015dollars for every request (if I remember correctly).
Yes Crawling is the act of read a page with a program, exactly like google does. The difference is on what you do with those data.
No, your ranking will not improve. Alexa is based on how many people with Alexa Toolbar installed are browsing your site.
Feel free to digg it, but let me know because my Digg plugin doesn’t work very well so I have to put it in here by hand :)
I’ll write some PHP code about Alexa sooner or later..
May 11th, 2007 at 6:08 am
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