Alexa Caught Fixing Rankings to Target Anti-Obama News Sites?

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Internal data suggests public figures are being manipulated
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
May 5, 2015

Internal traffic data from Infowars.com suggests that Alexa is fixing its rankings system to target conservative and anti-Obama administration news websites while artificially boosting the rankings of pro-government leftist media outlets.

The controversy first arose last year when both Infowars and World Net Daily noticed that despite internal traffic reports from several different sources showing that traffic was on the increase, Alexa’s publicly available statistics showed a massive and unexplained drop-off in traffic from August 2014 onwards.

Alexa rankings are important because they gauge the popularity of news websites that compete with each other as well as providing analytics for potential advertisers.

Alexa is owned by Amazon, which has numerous close ties to the Obama White House. Amazon hired Obama’s former press secretary Jay Carney earlier this year, while the administration also supported Amazon during a Supreme Court hearing last year on workers’ rights. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a staunch Democrat. Obama personally visited an Amazon center just six days before Bezos bought the Washington Post.

Infowars has now confirmed that the huge drop off in traffic reported by Alexa seen in the graph above directly contradicts Alexa’s own internal traffic reports, which clearly show that Infowars’ web traffic did not significantly change during the period from August 2014 onwards.

Infowars’ internal data from Google analytics also contradicts the drop off shown in Alexa’s public rankings.

One explanation for the rankings change that has been suggested is that although traffic for each of these websites has stayed the same or risen, the inclusion of a number of new websites in Alexa’s system has collectively pushed older sites down the charts.

However, the same trend would be expected for other news websites, whether they slant left or right, but this isn’t the case.

Indeed, virtually every major leftist or pro-Obama website has seen a drastic increase in its site ranking since August 2014, a rise that is almost perfectly inverse to the plummeting site rankings of conservative websites as reported in Alexa’s public data.

Alex Jones: “It’s clear that starting on October 1st 2014, Libertarian minded sites ratings artificially plunged and Obama supporting sites were artificially raised. These are unfair trade practices and deception being executed against the people and need to be questioned.”

Check out Alexa’s public rankings for pro-Obama/leftist news websites over the past year and compare them to Infowars.com.

Also note how Alexa has downgraded other conservative websites.

Although conservative sites have recovered some of their traffic in the last month, the drop since August 2014 is noticeable across the board.

Again, in the case of both World Net Daily and Infowars, this public data is contradicted by more detailed internal data pulled from Alexa’s own system.

In addition, it was widely reported that 2014 was a huge year for the Drudge Report, which the news aggregator being the , “No. 1 site of referral traffic to the Daily Mail, CNN, Fox News, Roll Call, Breitbart, The New York Times, National Journal, USA Today, Associated Press, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and POLITICO,” according to a study by Intermarkets.

Also remember that in the case of MSNBC, the network’s viewing audience figures continue to plummet, making the drastic increase in traffic to the MSNBC site as reported by Alexa even more perplexing. PBS also continues to hemorrhage viewers.

“It smacks, at first glance, like a deliberate effort to destroy and discredit alternative news sites – especially those that don’t grovel at the feet of government and seek to be the watchdogs the American press are supposed to be,” said WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah when the issue first arose.

“How does one explain the disparity between the recent gains on Alexa by statist, pro-government, pro-status quo, establishment sites and the precipitous drops on Alexa by the anti-establishment alternatives?” he added.

If the huge drop in traffic for conservative websites, which began last year, was merely a result of Alexa changing how it collects data, then why hasn’t a similar fall been seen for leftist news websites and why does Alexa’s own internal data contradict their public rankings?

Watch the video below in which Alex Jones delves further into the mystery.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.