I just checked out alexa.com, and was very surprised to see graphs for my blogs domain. (Note: the other stuff in the same domain has even less visitors; alexa says 75% are on the blog)

Alexa graph for blog.drinsama.de

Apparently, one day beginning of april, drinsama.de made it into the top 100.000 domains at alexa again (happened in january and february, too). This very likely was my blog posting on running MSIE on Linux (whyever you might want to do that…).

But their numbers are just absurdly off. They claim my blog has a reach of 20 Mio users. My ModLogAn, which uses the actual access logs, lists a peak of 358 visitors on April 4 (average is around 300 for March, 220 average in April so far). This doesn’t include readers on Planet Debian, which is probably the largest share. At alexa, the domain peaked at .6 million pageviews

  • ModLogAn says 10k.

I have, however, lots of referrals from Digg.com, Reddit.com and del.icio.us this month, since they’ve picked up my MSIE posting. Maybe this will happen again with the Cross-platform virus posting.

I do think it has to do with users using the alexa toolbar and similar things (there is a nice firefox extension for showing Google Pagerank and Alexa traffic rating). My personal homepage, which is totall overrated in Google and has had an average of 1000 unique daily visitors in December and January, never made it that highly into alexa. While having three times as many visitors, alexa thinks it’s 3-4 times worse.

The difference is probably the power users. My personal page doesn’t have “power visitors” like my blog.