How Accurate is Alexa rating? How do you interpret it.

[yberlin]

How accurate is Alexa rating, and how do you interpret it.

When you rate a site and it tells you they give you a number for instance 543,323

What does that mean?

[Jim Guinn]

Your Alexa rating - is it really that important?
Copyright 2004 Richard Grady

A discussion in my forum has prompted this newsletter as I
think it is important for any online entrepreneur to
understand how Alexa ratings work in order that they can
understand why they may not be that important to the
success of their online business. Too many people make the
mistake of concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa
ratings but at the end of the day, these rankings are just
numbers - they won't put money in the bank.

Alexa is a company owned by the Amazon group and it aims to
rank every single website on the Internet in terms of how
much traffic it is receiving.

Quite simply, the lower your Alexa ranking, the more
traffic your website gets. The ideal scenario would be to
have an Alexa ranking of '1'. This would mean, in theory,
that your website receives more traffic than any other
website in the world. Currently this position is held by
Yahoo.com and as you would expect, other top sites include
Microsoft, Google and eBay.

It is generally considered that a website with an Alexa
rating of 100,000 or less is receiving a reasonable level
of traffic but Alexa can be wildly misleading and very
easily manipulated.

To understand why the rankings are misleading, you need to
understand how Alexa gathers the data that it uses to
create the rankings in the first place. This is really
very simple - Alexa has a free toolbar that you can
download and install within your Internet browser and this
reports back to Alexa with the details of every single
website that you visit.

Alexa can then use this information to see how many users
are visiting a particular website. Then, because not every
Internet user has the Alexa toolbar installed, Alexa will
multiply the number of visitors by a specific margin to
estimate the total number of visitors that a site may
typically receive. The important word in the last sentence
is 'estimate'.

Let's assume that the above multiplication margin is ten -
that means that for each Alexa toolbar user that visits a
specific web page, Alexa assumes that another nine
non-toolbar users will also visit the same page. This
means that if 100 toolbar users visit a specific web page
on a given day, Alexa will take this as meaning that a
total of 1000 people visited the same page in that 24 hour
period.

This is where the figures can get distorted. If you have a
website that attracts a higher than average number of Alexa
toolbar users, then you are going to gain a lower Alexa
rating because Alexa doesn't make any allowance for the
fact that their toolbar users visit certain types of site
more often. A typical example of this is Internet
marketing sites. Most Internet entrepreneurs will have the
Alexa toolbar installed because they like to see the Alexa
rankings for sites as they visit them (the toolbar shows
you this information as soon as you visit a site). But
this means that if your website attracts a lot of Internet
marketing-type visitors, then your Alexa rating will be
inflated above what it should be.

Here is a true-life example:

There was a popular Internet marketing site for sale last
year and it had an Alexa rating of about 19,000. I figured
it must be getting heavy traffic but when I discussed the
matter with the owner/seller, I found that it was only
receiving 6000 unique visitors a month! The reason that the
Alexa rating was so low was because the majority of these
visitors had the Alexa toolbar installed and therefore the
calculations were being thrown out massively.

It is also possible to purchase software that will generate
false hits to your site using the Alexa technology so that
Alexa is fooled into believing that more people are
visiting your site. This pushes your Alexa ranking down.

At the end of the day though, what is the point of having a
low Alexa rating if you are not making any sales? Sure it
is nice to be able to say that your site is in the top
20,000 websites in the world but if the site isn't earning
you an income, this ranking means very little (assuming
that it was your intention for the site to earn you an
income of course). Personally, I would much rather have a
high Alexa ranking but a good income than a low ranking and
minimal income.

Of course, there are benefits to the Alexa service and it
can be worthwhile installing their toolbar. The toolbar
will give you an indication of how busy a particular site
is and in turn, how popular it is. This can be helpful
when making a decision as to whether to make an online
purchase for example. It is also handy for checking out
your competitors

Just don't get too hung up on Alexa as a measure of how
well your business is doing. The real statistics that you
should be watching are actual traffic numbers, conversion
rates (ie. how many visitors actually buy something) and
overall sales. These are the figures that will help you
put cash in the bank and improve and grow your business.

If you are interested in finding out more about Alexa and
if you wish to install their toolbar, you can do so at
http://www.alexa.com


----------------------------------------------------
Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since
1998. Find out more about Richard at:
http://www.thetraderonline.com Free wholesale search
engines: UK- http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US
http://www.thewholesaletrader.com

[PattyGale]

I don't think Alexa has been used as a reputable ranking tool for quite some time, so I wouldn't bother with it.




Patty

[Jim Guinn]

Even Google's Page Rank is really only good for getting links from other sites with high PR. Other than that, Google's PR means nothing as far as a true indicator of a site's success.

Jim

[calvinchin]

Hi Jim,

Thank you for such a detail explanation of how Alexa works...

I was trying to fight for the higher ranking in Alexa and PR, but seems too
much effort has been taken and not seeing real results.

However, google somehow using a bit of PR to dictate the search results,
so if we want to appear at high position, we have to put in effort to increase
the PR too.

[Lynn Terry]

I was trying to fight for the higher ranking in Alexa and PR, but seems too much effort has been taken and not seeing real results.

However, google somehow using a bit of PR to dictate the search results,
so if we want to appear at high position, we have to put in effort to increase the PR too.

The key is to do the things that naturally reward you with higher PR and better Alexa rankings. You cant really 'fight for them' or 'try for them' without doing these things anyway, so it's just a matter of shifting your focus to creating a quality resource and promoting it properly. I find it much easier to work in that mode, and with that focus... and the results come naturally.

Any type of 'manipulation' is going to be harder work with lesser results - and could very well give you the opposite results you desire in the long run.

So what types of things should you focus on?

- Quality Content
- Functionality/Usability
- Internal Link Structure
- Gaining Exposure (network on forums/blogs, submit to quality directories, etc)
- Obtaining quality Inbound Links from established (related) websites
- Submitting quality articles/content to directories & webmasters

We were just discussing this on my blog: Adding Value to the Web You might enjoy that article as well

[calvinchin]

Hi Lynn,

Thanks for your recommendation....

I will put more FOCUS on those issues now...

[Jason Moffatt]

Jim,

Awesome post there.

I agree Alexa ranking doesn't really mean squat outside
of the IM world.

Heck, I wish it did. My Alexa ranking is about 138,000 for
my blog. People assume I get flooded with traffic, but in reality
I maybe get 100 unique visitors a day.

Most of them are in the marketing arena, which is why I assume
I get favorable Alexa rankings.

[mrLenin]

Frenkly speaking I can't figure out what tool is most verisimilar. Alexa, Goole PR or internetfortune? Rather different result. Does anybody know why?