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Although I wholeheartedly agree that StackOverflow is orders of magnitude nicer than experts exchange, I really don't trust compete and their numbers.

compete reported a sharp decline of unique visitors to our site in nov and dec, even though those were are best months ever for both traffic and business (according to google analytics, and our bank acocunt). Of course there's nothing we can really do about it. What can you do? Complain? Write a flame blog post? Compete's numbers are not solid, they are all estimated from some crazy algorithm. It would be nice to just brush it off, but when potential customers are looking at compete and thinking we are tanking, it's bad news.



I think this is an important point. As much as it's nice to think that SO is destroying EE. There's no evidence that compete.com's numbers are anything but fiction.


Yes, but Alexa says the same thing and has for a while.


I really wouldn't trust Alexa on that either. As far as I know, their sole source of data is a toolbar.


Traffic reporting companies are, more or less, the credit ratings agencies of the web. Their numbers tell you something, but never what they claim to.


So Alex is correlated with Compete.com in this case. I'm still not convinced they represent actual reality though.

But I guess that is a bit more convincing than just the one.


I agree. Compete numbers are just random. Just pure fiction.




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