Let me make one thing clear. Alexa Rankings are useless – unless you want to sell your website or sell advertising on it. Many people are very critical of the Alexa Rankings system, but nevertheless, Alexa Rankings are a frequently used statistic tool to evaluate a site’s popularity and traffic and value. And until there is something more fair, you need to care about Alexa Rankings.
Why? Because advertisers and other possible investors in your website will probably use Alexa rank like one of the parameters to determinate your websites value.
Alexa ranks sites based on information from users of Alexa Toolbar.
Wikipedia; Alexa Internet Inc is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon – Alexa Internet was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.
It’s unknown how many people actually use the Toolbar. According to Alexa, by 2005 there had been over 10 million downloads of the toolbar. But the company does not provide info on how many of them are actually used.
New Statistics And Design
On March 2009 Alexa.com got a complete redesign and new metrics including: Pageviews per User, Bounce Rate, and Time on Site. In the following weeks they added new features including Demographics, Clickstream and Search Traffic stats.
In theory, the Alexa website with the redesign and new statistics could be a very good tool for site owners and other internet professionals – if the accuracy of ranking would be better, more fair, and not so easily manipulated by ranking professionals.
Accuracy Of Ranking
If Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population, Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate. In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. A known source of bias is the self-selecting Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.
You could question how representative the users of the Alexa toolbar are for the rest of the Internet users, because only webmasters and marketers might have some interest in the statistics provided by Alexa rankings and also more likely to download the toolbar.
Quantcast: The site attracts a more male crowd.The typical visitor watches PBS Online and reads Techcrunch.
It’s possible that a site with only 20 visitors a day might have an Alexa Ranking of
150,000, and a site with 5000 visitors a day with a Ranking of 500,000, only because the first site has some content that attracts webmasters with the Alexa toolbar installed.
On April 16, 2008 users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this with an announcement that they had released the “New Alexa Ranking System” claiming that they now take into account data sources “beyond Alexa Toolbar users”.
Regarded As Spyware
The Alexa toolbar is regarded by some vendors as spyware.
McAfee classifies it as Adware, a “Potentially Unwanted Program.” McAfee SiteAdvisor rates Alexa.com as yellow, with the warning, “In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs”.
Symantec classifies the toolbar as Trackware and Microsoft considers the Alexa Toolbar (for Internet Explorer 7) as malware and as such cannot be installed on Windows Vista.
Computer users have reported unexpected and negative impacts on their systems after installing the Alexa toolbar.
Short Info: The company’s name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria, the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world.
5 Ways To Improve Your Alexa Rank
Because advertisers and investors still use Alexa Rank like one of the tools to measure your site, you might be interested in some easy methods to improve your rank.
1. Install Alexa Toolbar and use your own website as startpage.
2. Encourage your friends and users to install the Alexa toolbar and use your website as startpage. You could make a simple startpage like this for your users.
3. List your website in directories, search engines, also the minor ones.
4. Join forums where you can meet other webmasters. Many webmasters have the Alexa toolbar installed. Put your link at the bottom of your post in a non-intrusive way.
5. Write about Alexa. Webmasters are interested about ways to increase their Alexa rank and they are already likely to have the toolbar installed.
A general advise would be to find visitors with the Alexa Toolbar installed – since the toolbar is mostly used by webmasters, you simply need to have content that attracts
as many webmasters as possible.
Short Info: Alexa includes archiving of webpages as they are crawled. This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine.
A Short Summary
Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat had good intentions when creating Alexa, but the structural problems, some of them mentioned above, make it to a less reliable if you need a tool that measures the value or traffic of your site.
Some problems with Alexa are:
- Alexa does not get much direct traffic
- Limited reach with the toolbar
- Alexa is biased toward webmaster and tech audience
- A small change in visitors can represent a huge change in Alexa ranking
Some advantages with Alexa are:
- A high grade of accessibility
- Alexa is a strong trademark amongst advertisers
- Alexa is a completely free service for your website
- A good Alexa rank gives easily higher prices on your advertising spots
Since advertisers probably use Alexa ranking you still need to keep an eye on it, but there is no need for panic if your rank is not in the top. There is other tools too.
If you have good Alexa Rank; great for you!
After all, the true value of Alexa Rank is like confidence booster.
Related:
- Alexa Internet by Wikipedia
- Alexa – Web Discovery Machine
- About the Alexa Traffic Rankings
- AboutUs article on Alexa Internet
- Alexa Ranking – Does it matter?
- 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank
Source: wikipedia.org, alexa.com
Always check to see if your competition places display ads. If not, that’s a pretty strong indication that it is not necessary to spend the money to attract callers.
It would be a great idea for Alexa.com to put a disclaimer on its website warning people that their data is “For Amusement / Entertainment Use Only” as Alexa rankings CAN be easily manipulated.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by thomas r. thomas r said: Are Alexa Rankings Useless? http://cashrevelations.com/magazine/2009/05/alexa-rankings/ [...]
Since you’re thinking of improving your Alexa Rankings, better give non-Alexa informed people some quick run down. The Alexa is under the umbrella of Amazon that offers information on different traffic levels for websites.
Alexa’s rankings are a meaningless number anyway… now meant only for entertainment value, has not accurate infos whatsoever so people don’t even bother about alexa ranking these days. Google Rank is much better
Another variation of the top sites ranking is online at http://www.ghq.com. This resource lists the top sites globally and per the eight english speaking countries. It is a very pragmatic and quick guide to the top web sites in the english speaking world.