What's wrong with Compete.com?
May 25th, 2008 by Andreas from Xavier Media® in The World According to Xavier, Xavier Media. Topics: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!
About the authorAndreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.
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May 26th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I see a red button for your site, this morning. There must be something screwy with their algorithm. That really sucks. Your site appears trusty to me…
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May 26th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Yes, you're right. It's back to red again
I guess you can't trust their trust icons
.
/Andreas
May 28th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
[...] March 2006 « What's wrong with Compete.com? [...]
April 21st, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Our firm spends a tremendous amount of time engaging online with prospective clients. As one of the leading legal consumer websites we have an obligation to constantly keep our ear to the ground with respect to changing technologies and client demands. In pursuit of quality analytics we opted to open an account http://www.compete.com. Almost immediately we found all data related to our website was inaccurate. Let me be clear here, ALL http://WWW.COMPETE.COM SELLS IS DATA and thus if the data is inaccurate then all they are selling is junk. To pour salt in the wounds of a dissatisfied client….the site has endless links to "upgrade" the use for few hundred dollars. This is a classic bait & switch.
I brought this to the attention of management who was rude & defensive. The agent who responded had more of a desire exercise his ego than to address the issues and have the problem resolved. No refund was offered despite my attempt to cancel within approximately one hour of opening the the account.
WE WOULD NOT RECOMMEND http://WWW.COMPETE.COM TO ANYONE. We intend to spread the word about poorly run companies like http://www.compete.com and praise those companies which provide excellent service such as http://www.getclicky.com. For more information regarding our opinion about http://www.compete.com please contact me at 800-300-0001.
If you feel you have been cheated by this company please contact me. We may pursue litigation against, what we believe, are false and misleading statements.
January 5th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
[...] larger, consumer-oriented websites with bigger budgets). This has led critics to lodge complaints like this one: “Let me be clear here, ALL http://WWW.COMPETE.COM SELLS IS DATA and thus if the data is [...]