I’ve added Alexa Traffic Ranking button on my site few months back. I know that Alexa’s traffic ranking is not accurate but its a good motivation to keep me going to get more visitors. Whenever the traffic ranking number drops, I work even harder to find and write good articles. Alexa ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4 million sometimes. The lower the rating on Alexa the better. So if a website has a ranking below 100,000 then the website should be getting a good number of daily visitors. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic. While a rating of 1 will be the website with the most traffic, a spot currently occupies by Yahoo. The main flaw in Alexa is that it only measures visits from people with the Alexa toolbar installed and Alexa assumes that this group of surfers are representative for all Internet surfers.

Anyway, when I added the code from Alexa to my blog in order to track my traffic, a small picture will be displayed stating the Traffic Ranking and date it was updated. Below is the picture of how Alexa’s Traffic Ranking picture looks like.

If you click on that picture, it will bring you to Amazon.com with a small thumbnailed screenshot of your website together with your traffic details. I am quite surprised to find that the thumbnailed screenshot of my website shows Precondition Failed. I honestly have no idea what is the meaning of this Precondition Failed error so I waited for a few weeks waiting for Alexa to crawl to my site and get a new screenshot. Weeks has passed and still the same Precondition Failed screenshot.

To solve this problem…


I just disabled Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress, waited for the next Alexa Traffic Ranking update, and voila, I now have my thumbnailed screenshot of my website and no more Precondition Failed thumbnail picture. Not sure why Bad Behaviour anti-spam plugin for WordPress can cause this Precondition Failed problem but the other anti-spam plugin such as Spam Karma 2 doesn’t. Perhaps Bad Behaviour is pretty old anti-spam plugin and hopefully the upcoming new version 2 will be a much better updated anti-spam plugin.