Alexa Bricked Up in China

 

 

 

As part of our continuing series on sites blocked in China, we are sad to announce today that Alexa.com is now being censored by the Great Firewall of China (GFW). Access to the site from China was first reported as interrupted on 27 December 2009.

For those of you unfamliar with the service, Alexa provides independent rankings and ratings of websites around the world.  While not the most reliable of measures, they do provide an independent means for judging the popularity of sites. Alexa achieves its rankings by anonymously registering the surfing habits of volunteers who install the Alexa toolbar.

There has been no word from the Chinese government (there never is) as to why this seemingly innocuous service is being blocked, nor any confirmation that it is indeed being blocked. However, users in Shanghai and other parts of China are unable to access Alexa, while users in other parts of the world can.  This also means that users in China who have installed the Alexa toolbar will no longer be able to have any of their traffic registered with Alexa.

The upshot of this move is two-fold:

• Users in China will have to find some other means of comparing website traffic (or access Alexa through a proxy)
• Sites located in China or who depend on users in China for a significant amount of their traffic (like RightSite) will see their Alexa rankings drop dramatically.

Since Alexa’s site contains no content other than rankings of sites, and since it is big enough to run its own servers and not share IP addresses with other sites, we are going to surmise that someone in the government was not happy with the way that the company was gathering its data.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Alexa launched a Chinese version of their site on October 15th of this year.  As services and sites in English are much more likely to be overlooked by the censors than those operating in Chinese, I would suspect that this development is somehow related to the authorities choosing this time to block this service that was founded in 1996.

Alas, since RightSite had only recently broken into the top 50,000 sites on Alexa worldwide, we are taking this news a bit hard.