What You NEED to Know About Alexa
December 3, 2007 | Author: Rob | Filed under: SEO and Marketing
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Alexa is a web information company and the Web’s most popular method of measuring web traffic. Albeit the best measure the Internet currently has it is far from perfect and easily manipulated / biased toward webmaster related niches. When you first find out about Alexa, and especially YOUR alexa rank it is easy become obsessed with it. You look at sites in the 100-500,000 range and think wow… These people are the 100-500,000’s most popular sites on the web. They MUST be getting TONES of traffic. Sadly it’s usually not the case.
The way Alexa works is you download a toolbar which was once only available for Internet Explorer and recently has become available for Mozilla Firefox. Downloading that toolbar only takes a few minutes and once installed it begins tracking the web site you visit. So basically the more people that visit your web site, and the page views shown on your web site to people with an Alexa toolbar dictate your Alexa rank. Sound like a pretty easy-to-use system and quite straightforward doesn’t it?
The problem with Alexa is that up until Firefox it was estimated that roughly 7% of the Internet users were using the toolbar. Of course of those 7% most of them were obviously webmaster’s. With the addition of the Mozilla Firefox toolbar I’m sure more than 7% of the population is using Alexa; but it still isn’t close to an accurate representation of traffic. When looking for link exchanges or advertising venues don’t be fooled by an Alexa ranking. Ask to see legitimate statistics for the last few months. If they can’t supply them move on!
The fastest method for anyone to obtain a better alexa ranking is to install the toolbar. Once installed all the sites you visit begin getting points and obviously you probably visit your blog / website quite often so there will be an obvious increase in the score of your site.
As an example of Alexa’s inaccuracies about 4-5 months ago Bloggeries was at 60,000 in the world and getting a third to double more traffic then it is today. However if you look at our Alexa ranking today we’re at ~31,000 with weekly averages in the 20,000’s. What’s the difference? The blog forum is much busier with webmasters who have the alexa toolbar installed.
Basically as I mentioned in the opening paragraph; Alexa is the best method we have for measuring sites but it’s incredibly biased towards webmaster related fields. A good friend of mine has a Celebrity Gossip site that gets 1500-3000 uniques a day and her alexa ranking is only 400,000. Why? Because most people looking for the latest scoop on Jessica Simpson from work don’t have the toolbar installed.
Now that you now what Alexa is all about I’d recommend you install the toolbar and start having the websites you visit counted. Also don’t be fooled by the illusion; many things on the internet are about vanity. Keep your sanity and worry about actual traffic, conversion rates, ad placement, sales etc… Those are the things that really matter to any business whether online or offline.
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3 people have left comments
Great article. Nice to get a better understanding of Alexa and how it really works.
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[…] Still sweating it out trying to get a high rank at Alexa? Maybe you need to read this article. Alexa is quite useful - it’s one of the few traffic metrics out there. However, it is far from accurate… http://homebizblogger.com […]