I've been using Compete.com a lot since I like their graphs and I find them useful when I'm doing estimates of the traffic to a web site. Ok, I know there are a lot of sceptic people out there not trusting their data, but since I don't see 7000 visitors to a site according to Compete.com as the full truth I still use them.

In March I noticed that they had changed the yellow button for XavierMedia.com to a red button warning people about my site. I couldn't figure out why on earth my site had been classified as a "spoof site, spammer and/or distributor of malware" so I sent them an email asking why. This is the answer I got from their support:

Hi Andreas,

Compete partners with multiple third-party sources to work together in providing the trust, security ratings. Compete has gone ahead and done an individual review of your site and found no problems, so your site’s trust score has been changed to the green rating. These rating changes are updated once a month, with the new site data, so you can expect this to go live on the Compete.com site when the March data is released in early April. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Andy Kazeniac

Compete, Inc. | Four Copley Place, Suite 700 | Boston, MA 02116
www.compete.com

So far so good. In April my site was flagged green as all the other trusted web sites out on the Internet , but last week I noticed that they had changed the button back to red again . So I replied to the email Andy sent to me in March asking once again why. This time I never got any answer from Andy so I sent another email from their web site to their support (Andy might be on vacation or something ).

I sent the email this Friday (23rd) and today I noticed that the red button had changed to yellow again:

Since they haven't been able to explain why they have done this and they don't have any detailed information on where they get their data from I have to ask can you really trust their data?

Does anyone on there know how they rank sites for their trust ranking?

If Compete.com is reading this, please explain what you're doing! Until I've received an explanation I will recommend people not to trust anything on the Compete.com website!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under The World According to Xavier, Xavier Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.