Alexa, if you are not familiar with it, is a service of Amazon.com, international seller of books and products online. One of the services that Alexa provides is “Alexa Site Information,” which includes three main areas:
There is one slight problem with the way that they gather this data, oh, and they don’t explain it very well either. To be accounted for visiting a website, you would have to have the Alexa cookie or have downloaded the Alexa toolbar.
Understanding how this affects the ranking of a website, Peter Norvig used some data from his website and a few others to explain the problem with this type of data gathering:
Consider the problem of comparing traffic to internet sites. Most sites keep their traffic numbers secret, so you need to rely on third parties that monitor a sampling of traffic. One such third party is the alexa.com traffic rankings. If you download a toolbar from Alexa, your visits are tracked anonymously, and the aggregate statistics are available for all to see. As Alexa explains there are some biases inherent in this process: sites associated with Alexa, such as Amazon.com are overrepresented; sites that use https protocol are underrepresented, and so on. But one bias they don’t really comment is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random. The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO industry, so it overrperesents those people.
Does this mean that Alexa traffic details is not valuable?
Absolutely NOT!
Alexa data and website statistics, like SEO advice, should be viewed as a guide and should be compared with other websites in the vertical that the website is in. Social websites can be compared as can search engines. What would this say about a given website? It gives you the insight to what a website in a given vertical is doing to reach the given group of users. Is this valuable? Of course this is valuable to marketers and should be considered, but not something to live by.
What are your thoughts?
Do you value Alexa rankings?
Do you even consider Alexa?
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Though I never trusted Alexa’s ranking reports because of the way it gathers visitor data for a particular site, I’ll not say it completely useless.
In my opinion, Alexa reports are considerable for busy sites (high traffic sites).
Avinash,
The importance comes from the value that you place on the data that is offered. If your rank is comparable to your competition, but their Alexa rank is greater than yours, you may not be reaching a segment that your competition is. This could be valuable information when you are analyzing how to expand your reach. Possibly a segment that you haven’t been exposed to. The name of the game is reach, regardless if you get this from offline marketing or online visibility. To control a market you have to reach everyone.
I have seen odd results in the Alexa traffic rankings. One of my sites gets about 5,000 visitors per day and has a decent Alexa ranking – however, 2 different sites which each get about 300 visitors per day have glaringly different Alexa rankings – if they both get similar traffic they should have a similar Alexa Ranking. I would think that one site gets more traffic from people with the Alexa toolbar / cookie than the other. Anyway – I have given up looking at or caring about the Alexa ranking.
Hello all
Alexa rankings can be counted two ways.
1. By the Alexa Toolbar.
2. Manually counted.
Manually counting hits does not rely on the toolbar to send data to Alexa – send it yourself!
You do this by placing an RSS feed from Alexa on your home page, and every time your home page is loaded, Alexa is informed via the RSS feed being loaded.
Yes – this works like the toolbar, but only for the pages that are displaying the RSS feed.
Use RSStoHTML converter (its a free php script). You can see it in action on my homepage.
( I only did this last week but the count has changed from 1.4million, to under 250,000….)
Http://webdziner.biz/index.html
Colin
I don’t see Alexa rankings useful, since the collected data is far from being accurate.
If you need to know your traffic details, just install visitor tracking software.
Alexa is more precise for sites with a high ranking. You can get a pretty good idea for maybe the top 50000 web sites, which of them are more popular. For the rest, it can have very high errors. One of my web sites got to a position around 250000 when I was visiting it myself (using Alexa toolbar), then it dropped to over 1.5 million when I didn’t visit it anymore. Anyway, I constantly check the Alexa ranking for most of the web sites I visit.
I’ve been doing things to lower my Alexa for weeks, and they’re working. One of my blogs started at 1,315,912
494,210, in less than a MONTH. Alexa does have holes in it, and it’s not a true measure of a blogs value, or traffic. (Hmm..did I just insult my own blog?)
I’m only concerned about Alexa because my advertisers are. I’m trying to educate them on why Alexa doesn’t work, but in the meantime, I have to work on my Alexa for the advertisers that want it anyway.
hi
Colin say there is another rss way for alexa
how ican do that in my site and where ican find the alexa rss?
I believe Alexa does have some benefit, whether it’s high or not. For instance, if one has NO Alexa ranking, then they’re probably not generating any business from their website at all. If it’s really high, you’re probably doing pretty well. That’s why I check it.
man.. I totally agree with you.
I don’t know if everyone knew about this or not, but I just found about how they get traffic information and I got so frustrated.
In my experience sites under the 100,000 rank can give some indication of traffic levels when evaluating advertising with them, etc.
Shane,
Thanks for the comment. Are all of these sites in the same vertical (similar content), or do they differ? If so, have you compared them to other competitors?
Colin,
Great point, I totally forgot about the script that you can add to your website to send data back to Alexa for ranking purposes. To find out more, you can go to Alexa to your website and edit the site information for your website and get more details.
Colleen,
Like you stated, it is important for some of us, for you its your advertisers impression of your blog. Similar to exchanging links, some (still) think that this is the only valuable form of link building, however, it is not the most valuable links and can do more harm than good.
Mohamed,
Try going to the Overview tab in Alexa Traffic Rankings for your website and edit your site information using the editor. Here is a link to more information from Alexa for webmasters: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters.
Brian Lee,
I hope that you aren’t too frustrated. Alexa is just an automated means to judge a website. It is flawed. Similar to PageRank, I have seen websites with little or no PageRank come up in SERPs higher than ones with moderate to high rankings (PR5-PR7). Does this mean that the lower PageRank site is less valuable, hell no. Give me a “No Data” website (Alexa) with a PR0 (Google) that ranks high in SERPs and generates traffic and revenue over a website in the top 100 (Alexa) and PR9 (Google) that no one ever sees and doesn’t pay for itself.
MarieLu,
Thank you for the comment. It is unfortunate that advertisers are not evaluating potential outlets by any other means than Alexa. It shows that they are looking for bulk traffic or branding rather than targeted traffic from relevant websites.
A tool like Alexa should be viewed with a grain of salt as was previously mentioned; it has inherent flaws, as it requires the download of Alexa’s toolbar. The general Internet community is reluctant to download toolbar as they some time place spyware on a computer.
They are very bad at picking up links to a site and submitted links takes six months or never get verified. It should have a very small part of the equation to determine traffic to a website.
Just like PageRank it is another tool to attempt to objectively evaluate a website.
Ntsike,
Thank you for your comment. I would like to add that objectivity, like advertisers that use Alexa for evaluating values for potential mediums, is in the eye of the beholder. I would also like to concur that the links listed in Alexa are extremely skewed, the best way to find a more realistic view of your inbound links is through Google Sitemaps (new link tool in Sitemaps) or Yahoo! SiteExplorer. I would like to point out that there is a script, possibly a META tag to notify Alexa of visitors automatically. Because this is server side, your visitors will not be required to have the Alexa cookie or the toolbar installed for you to receive credit.
Hello again.
Alexa knows the page has been loaded because the page has thier feed embedded in it. And yep, I know its just a ranking system, and it has flaws 
For those that are interested in the php script that I use to display the alexa rss feed( any alexa rss works fine, top 500, movers and shakers etc..) is called FEED2HTML.PHP(zip), its free, download at http://www.extralabs.net.
On most of my pages I just display the title from the rss feed( the small alexa link box eg on http://webdziner.biz/shareware/software-directory.php – at the bottom left hand side of the page ) Its working fine
Alexa rank is comparable to toolbar pagernak, just for bragging rights, and in reality has nothing to do with SERPs.