Alexa - How Useful Is It?
by KevinG
There has been debate among webmasters over the Alexa toolbar and ranks since it's inception. I have mostly defended Alexa as a useful webmaster tool, albiet, with a built-in "fudge-factor". Others have asserted that it's usefulness is limited because it relies on numbers based on surfers that have the Alexa Toolbar installed. Further, these numbers can be skewed towards webmaster sites, as webmasters are more likely to have the toolbar than surfers. Therefore, webmaster frequented sites will have a better Alexa rank than a surfer site with the same amount of traffic.
I am wondering if Alexa's usefulness is declining, or perhaps the scale has just shifted and I need to get used to it.
Alexa attempts to rank a web site based on traffic. The Alexa rank is a number that implies where a web site sits on a list, with #1 supposedly being the site with the most traffic. For example, according to Alexa, Yahoo is the number 1 site. Google is #2, MSN is #3, MySpace is #4 and eBay is #5. The implication is that the lower your Alexa number, the more traffic you have.
What has recently caught my attention is seeing web site traffic increasing, while at the same time the Alexa rank has changed to imply the opposite. I had a site go from 4,000 uniques a day and an Alexa in the 40,000's to 6,000 uniques a day and the Alexa rank change to 90,000. I have experienced the same on more than one site.
My guess is that the reason for this trend can be two-fold.
1. The new visitors to these sites are surfers that do not have the Alexa toolbar installed.
2. Since the Alexa rank is a comparison, there could be other sites that are increasing their visitor base that has the toolbar, thereby pushing down other sites that may have not even lost traffic, and possibily even gained traffic.
For me, as a person that has followed Alexa ranks since the beginning, it makes it harder to judge a site based on this number. About 3-4 years ago, in one of my marketing articles, I wrote "A site with 5000 unique visitors per day can have an Alexa ranking between 10,000-16,000". That was based on my own personal experience at the time. Now, my experience shows that a site with 5000 unique visitors can have an Alexa rank of 90,000.
My opinion is that Alexa's usefulness to a webmaster for judging another site's traffic has continued to decline. It is useful, imo, for judging very high traffic sites and very low traffic sites. Everything in between has a high level of ambiguity.
Kevin provides services in web development, online marketing and search engine optimization. He can be reached at kevin@cigar-review.com, or by icq: 271024660
There has been debate among webmasters over the Alexa toolbar and ranks since it's inception. I have mostly defended Alexa as a useful webmaster tool, albiet, with a built-in "fudge-factor". Others have asserted that it's usefulness is limited because it relies on numbers based on surfers that have the Alexa Toolbar installed. Further, these numbers can be skewed towards webmaster sites, as webmasters are more likely to have the toolbar than surfers. Therefore, webmaster frequented sites will have a better Alexa rank than a surfer site with the same amount of traffic.I am wondering if Alexa's usefulness is declining, or perhaps the scale has just shifted and I need to get used to it.
Alexa attempts to rank a web site based on traffic. The Alexa rank is a number that implies where a web site sits on a list, with #1 supposedly being the site with the most traffic. For example, according to Alexa, Yahoo is the number 1 site. Google is #2, MSN is #3, MySpace is #4 and eBay is #5. The implication is that the lower your Alexa number, the more traffic you have.
What has recently caught my attention is seeing web site traffic increasing, while at the same time the Alexa rank has changed to imply the opposite. I had a site go from 4,000 uniques a day and an Alexa in the 40,000's to 6,000 uniques a day and the Alexa rank change to 90,000. I have experienced the same on more than one site.
My guess is that the reason for this trend can be two-fold.
1. The new visitors to these sites are surfers that do not have the Alexa toolbar installed.
2. Since the Alexa rank is a comparison, there could be other sites that are increasing their visitor base that has the toolbar, thereby pushing down other sites that may have not even lost traffic, and possibily even gained traffic.
For me, as a person that has followed Alexa ranks since the beginning, it makes it harder to judge a site based on this number. About 3-4 years ago, in one of my marketing articles, I wrote "A site with 5000 unique visitors per day can have an Alexa ranking between 10,000-16,000". That was based on my own personal experience at the time. Now, my experience shows that a site with 5000 unique visitors can have an Alexa rank of 90,000.
My opinion is that Alexa's usefulness to a webmaster for judging another site's traffic has continued to decline. It is useful, imo, for judging very high traffic sites and very low traffic sites. Everything in between has a high level of ambiguity.
Kevin provides services in web development, online marketing and search engine optimization. He can be reached at kevin@cigar-review.com, or by icq: 271024660
posted by
Hammer
at
9:32 AM
6 Comments:
I find that Alexa, like many tools of its ilk, is only useful for apples-to-apples comparisons. If we assume that two similar sites draw traffic from the same or mostly the same pools, then the Alexa rank system is actually quite useful for saying "Site A has more traffic than Site B."
For example, I operate a porn freesite blog. It seems reasonable to me that I can estimate the approximate traffic level of another porn freesite blog by comparing their Alexa rank to mine. And I can bring in more data to round out the comparison by examining Alexa's reported Reach per Million to mine. That is often useful because the Reach doesn't always seem to correspond arithmetically to the Rank (which, of course, is another indicator that the Rank, Reach or both are low-reliability instruments.)
For oranges-to-apples, or sometimes even Pink-Lady-apples-to-Red-Delicious-apples, comparisons the Alexa Rank system does seem like a very low reliability instrument to me.
Alexa really cannot be trusted, even as a "yard stick".
We had one domain, joyscope.com, being developed as part of our servers. Not one single user from the outside worked on this site (it had ip blocking). Only one developer was working on it, using IE and an Alexa toolbar.
In a very short time, the alexa rank went to 60,000. Just by one visitor! Amazing.
Yes, Alexa can be easily manipulated and is in many cases, highly misleading, but for now, it's the best way we have of getting a general idea of how our websites compare with our competition.
You're very astute and a breath of fresh air, Hammer Man.
My website has seen its unique visitors per day (as tracked by Google Analytics and similarly credible tracking services) 'double' in the last 2 years, yet my Alexa ranking has DROPPED from 15,205 to 22,000.
It's a frustratingly poor indicator of website growth, one that now vexes me daily.
My website has seen its unique visitors per day (as tracked by Google Analytics and similarly credible tracking services) 'double' in the last 2 years, yet my Alexa ranking has DROPPED from 15,205 to 22,000.
There's a quiet simple explanation for that. Total traffic on the net has seen a massive increase in the past two years. Your site has doubled the traffic, but new sites with more traffic have popped up lowered your rank despite your growth.
It is incredible that a tool that want to be considered serious (Alexa) only works with IE!!!
As much as I would like to use Alexa I refuse to be blackmailed into the unsafe and slow world of IE.
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