Smells Fishy

As many WUWT readers know, I have been using alexa.com for quite sometime to gauge the performance of WUWT. Reader “Pat” brought this recent strange disparity to my attention. When you see things like the Drudge report plummet and MSNBC soar, you know immediately that something isn’t right:

Those who run watchdog news websites are scratching their heads and trying to make sense of the latest data released by a California company that measures website traffic.

According to data for July through September, almost every major website – from WND to the Drudge Report and Breitbart – saw its rankings drop on Alexa.com while pro-government sites mostly went up.

Source: WND

The claim seems to be true when you look at Alexa’s publicly reported traffic graphs. Here’s the Drudge Report according to Alexa:

(Lower numbers are better, for example, Google is #1)

And here is MSNBC according to Alexa:

I find that hard to believe. I find this even harder to believe, Fox News according to Alexa:

And the Soros driven Center for American Progress, aka thinkprogress.org according to Alexa

The exception to that knee up for left leaning websites starting in September is CNN.com according to Alexa:

So, this may be some sort of reporting or tracking goof. But, the oddity does not stop there.

Now, look at WUWT compared to the eco-news website “Grist”, which we long ago surpassed.

First, here is WUWT according to Alexa. Note the same “knee” in the graph as seen on the Drudgereport earlier:

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