THE WAR ON FREE PRESS CONTINUES
Exclusive: Joseph Farah exposes 'mysterious, inexplicable rankings revolution' at site
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For 17 years, longer than any other independent Internet news agency, WND.com has been fighting to re-establish the free press in America.
We’ve battled challenges from the federal government, the corporate gatekeepers in the Big Media, corrupt banksters, cultural revolutionaries, well-funded professional smear artists and a thousand other adversaries along the way.
The latest attack, camouflaged under the guise of a new-and-improved, more accurate algorithm, comes from an Internet ranking company owned by Amazon.com called Alexa.com.
Beginning just 10 days ago, Alexa.com, which specializes in ranking websites all over the world in order of popularity, instituted a new system that has precipitated plunges in the positions of FoxNews.com, the DrudgeReport, Breitbart.com, DailyCaller.com, Infowars.com, NewsMax.com, WND.com and many other “alternative” Internet news sites – or those which, like WND.com, are, in one way or another, attempting to serve the role of government watchdog.
Meanwhile, while those sites are in free-fall on Alexa.com, statist, “progressive” content sites, some of which serve only as watchdogs of the watchdogs, are skyrocketing on the Alexa rankings . None of this has anything, of course, to do with a sudden change in the public’s news consumption habits. Though officials at Alexa finally responded to WND’s persistent requests for comment after nearly three days of silence, the company has offered no explanation for this remarkable, dramatic, overnight shift in their rankings.
What do I conclude from this?
The only conclusion I can draw after similar battles over the decades with Internet giants like Google and Bing and the Big Media establishment is that Alexa has joined the war on the free press. I can only conclude that the once-reputable company has thrown its lot in with the corporate gatekeepers who are threatened by the competition from the upstart muckrakers.
WND news stories have documented the otherwise mysterious, inexplicable rankings revolution taking place at Alexa.com:
What’s happening at Alexa.com is shocking and demands a public response from Amazon.com. Over the last 17 years WND has been around, we’ve seen this kind of thing before. It smacks of a deliberate effort to destroy and discredit alternative news sites – especially those that don’t grovel at the feet of government and who seek to be the watchdogs the American news media are supposed to be.
How else 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? Again, to be clear , these rankings are not in any way based on dropping traffic. No such drop is taking place. The Alexa rankings, based on what we’ve seen over the last week or so, suggest the company has thrown out its role as a politically impartial Internet ranking service and thrown its lot in with search engines like Google and Bing, which admittedly give preference through their skewed algorithms to establishment content sites like CNN and Huffington Post.
The shift is widespread in its “political correctness” standard : Websites like Planned Parenthood are suddenly soaring, while the pro-life LifeNews.org is falling like a rock.
All Alexa has said about what’s happening is posted below:
“Thanks for your inquiry. Below is some additional information about how Alexa calculates ranks. We have not recently changed our methodology.
“The Alexa ranks are updated daily. Most Global and Country ranks are based on our panel of toolbar users which is a sample of all internet users; specifically the Global rank is based on unique visitor and page-view metrics from the past 3 months and the Country ranks are based on metrics from the past 1 month. If a site’s metrics are Certified the Global and Country ranks can be based on Certified Site Metrics from the past 3 months and from the past month, respectively. The Certified Site Metrics feature is available on all of our paid subscription plans: http://www.alexa.com/plans
“The rank graph at the top of the Site Overview page shows a site’s rank smoothed over the trailing 30 days, making it less meaningful than the 3 month rank. The smoothed rank plot points on the graph tend to fluctuate more often than the 3 month global rank that appears at the top of Site Overview pages.”
Apparently, Alexa has made a corporate decision not to answer WND’s inquiries about the sudden discrepancies between rankings of watchdog and “progressive” sites.
Maybe Alexa needs to hear from you.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/10/the-war-on-free-press-continues/#Of1ku5QeX7E6PvyE.99
