Alexa Image Crawler

Where does Alexa get the pictures shown on their Overview Page?

[Nodge]

Their FAQ answer doesn't really tell you. It says that they are taken by Alexa's 'Image Crawler'. On the image for one of our sites, in top left hand corner you can clearly see a drop-down menu. Does this mean that the image crawler is a real person taking screenshots of the sites.

Any ideas & how can they be updated?

[jrobbio]

Either that or the way back machine aka archive.org

[jeremy goodrich]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Nodge! Alexa has their own crawler -> ia_archiver (you've probably seen it in your server's log files...) which seems to be the logical bot for them to use to generate the screen shot of a site.

As for 'how the screen shot can be updated' I think that they either have their own schedule for doing so -> or you might drop them an email / fill in a contact form of some kind & ask ;)

Good luck!