Wired2Mac - 3:52 am on Feb 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

I could not find this posted anywhere else on Webmasterworld.com so hope I have posted this in the right area.

I have long been aware of Alexa have myself positioned quite well on the engine. However in the last months I have noticed reviews showing up for my business site. The first two impressed but who were these reviews from? Perhaps a customer who cloaked their name to keep their privacy.

Recently last week while reviewing my stats I noticed a very negative review posted about a month ago. Again from a person I have never heard of. I brought this to the attention of my partner who is a research queen? she was able to find a review on our competitor's site on the same date. The ironic thing about the post on our competitor's site is that it is exactly the opposite and related to the review for our site. Amazing! I will clear the air here in saying that I have had not one dissatisfied customer in my 5 years of business so that rules out the negative review being from a client.

The negative review is not what bothers me because it is an uneducated review. It is Alexa's poor review system that fails at making reviews creditable.

Alexa Reviews need to be Reviewed!
To see how this system works, I did the honorable thing by trying to submit my own review to webmasterworld.com's listing. It was easy and don't worry :) it was positive. What is scary is I could have said anything and used any e-mail address I wanted as long as I was there to confirm the review. Meaning anyone with a Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail address can submit a review.

What is the point of Alexa review when it is not actually backed up from a creditable or qualified source? What would stop me from doing the unethical and posting negative reviews against my competitors? I am a strong believer in Karma so I don?t go there, but others do so it seems.

I contacted Alexa regarding my concerns and I got a reply stating that all reviews are reviewed and approved before posting them. Even after showing them my example of the 2 similar posts that would without reason clearly show it was my competitor reviewing against me. I communicated clearly that I don?t want either of the reviews good or bad if I don?t know they are from a creditable source.

How can the quality of reviews be improved? I don?t want them if the reviewer did not go through more qualifications to post the review. Further, I think Alexa is going to model them selves after Google they want quality results correct? What is the point of reviews anyway?