Alexa Rankings?

[craig96]

I have never been too fussed about Alexa Rankings and not even looked. Are there actually any benefits of getting your site higher in Alexa?

[Peter Willis]

It looks good to advertisers, no other benefit.

[rola]

I agree with Peter, it attracts advertisers and fix a higher rate on your site.
Besides that, for the few people who actually check this tool it helps making a decision as to whether to trust a website or not... but again, it is not totally accurate.

I personally think that page rank is more important because it determines the usability of the site and not only the popularity.

[TheGooner]

PR as an advertising metric? Measure usability?? LOL really?
Never heard that one before.


Alexa is an attempt at volume measurement - and if you see a website rated in the top 100,000 then it is likely to be a busy site.

There are several downsides to Alexa's methods :
- it has a relatively small base of toolbars to calculate it's rankings
- sites ranked above 500,000 have very little traffic.

Other sites like compete.com attempt to measure traffic for advertising purposes too - but do NOT provide a site ranking - just a traffic volume.

[Murton]

Alexa is VERY unreliable according to most people and I firmly believe this also. Please do not be bothered about Alexa at the slightest.

[bonusbeast]

I look at Alexa as just a "cool tool", something that does not hold much value, but is fun to look at and do some comparisons. As "thegooner" said, Alexa only pulls their stats from people that have the Alexa toolbar installed, which is a very small percentage.

[jackspo]

Alexa is cool about website traffic but no one is aware ho to measure traffic...

[ginigo]

Alexa's ranking is just a quick indicator of how well your site is doing but it's not precise because it gathers the info from the users that have installed their tool bar and are sharing this information.


What's certain is that if you're site is doing really good, chances are it will show up there as well performing too but don't rely only on Alexa. I agree with Peter that it looks good for advertising, I know some people at some affiliate networks who use Alexa to judge a site's performance.

[best.hands]

Alexa rankings don't actually provide any benefits at all, aside from it only indicates how far your traffic have gone. It is only a tool that shows how much traffic your site gets relative to all other websites, but it has nothing to do with search engine rankings, correct me if I am wrong.


Somehow, the only benefit I can think of with a high Alexa Ranking is it can attract advertisers. Since Alexa rank is base on the volume of traffic your website get, just like on PR, it definitely attracts other sites or blogs with the same niche to place their links, or if you sell your site, it has a higher value.

[davemerry]

I share the same view as a lot of people on this thread that the main benefits of Alexa is to gather quick metrics for advertising potential.

An interesting flaw I noticed quite a while back. They gather data through there toolbar however the majority of people who install browser toolbars are webmasters or people who work online, therefore results for webmaster related sites such as this are hugely innacurate. I mean, I love this site n'all but is it in the top 10,000 in the world for traffic??? No way.

I remember whilst building a site I had the Alexa toolbar active, somehow by the time I had finished it had a fairly decent Alexa rank, although analytics showed that I had only recieved 6 visitors easy to see how it can be manipulated.

[JoeAdams]

Alexa ranking has no significant benefit, as everyone here has pointed out. And in addition, I've read somewhere that your website's Alexa rank can only be increased whenever a user visit your site WITH an Alexa toolbar installed in his/her browser.

Alexa Traffic Rank is traffic rank of a site. The traffic rank is based on 3 months of historical traffic data collected from the users of Alexa Toolbar.

Source: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-does-...ings-work.html

Ordinary users won't bother to download Alexa Toolbar, as there is a large percentage of users with no knowledge about Alexa rankings, so therefore, the REAL traffic that a website receives is NOT reflected through Alexa rankings..

[jackrhodes]

As far as i know they only count visits from people with the alexa toolbar installed because when a user visits a site using the bar , it registers with Alexa and so affects your rank. In short, you need to get lots of people to get the toolbar installed and visit your site.

[rinnyronald]

Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. Learn how the traffic of your website against all your competitors! This is one of the most accurate available for free to learn how your site ranks against millions of other Web sites. It is capable of fraud. Your best source for the control of its traffic from Google Analytics.

[universal4]

Rinny,

You start your post by saying that the Alexa bar is a powerful tool and then state it can be defrauded.

Well I am of the opinion that Alexa is NOT a very good tool, and yes the numbers can be manipulated. In fact we ran a test here a few years ago and manipul;ated the numbers on about 20 sites.

Sadly, some people have been misled to believe that there is a high value in Alexa and base advertising purchas decisions on the rank give to sites by them. (this does translate into some value for them)

You state that the toolbar does help determine a site's ranking among millions of other sites, but it ONLY dertermines that rank among those who use the toolbar.

Rick
Universal4

[TheGooner]

Well I am of the opinion that Alexa is NOT a very good tool, and yes the numbers can be manipulated. In fact we ran a test here a few years ago and manipulated the numbers on about 20 sites.

How far could you manipulate the numbers? Did you get anything into the top 100,000 sites?

-------

I find Alexa is a better tool than most sites for ranking traffic and certainly far better than weird measurements like PR or even total number of backlinks. Both of these metrics are heavily "gamed" these days and just do not reflect the eyeballs visiting the sites.

Alexa's ranking is quite scaled though - anything between 500,000 to 1,000,000 is likely to only be receiving 100 to 200 hits a day, and 1,000,000+ is basically a dustbowl with less than 100 visitors. Once you get to 4,000,000+ you are only talking about 10 or so hits per day IMO.

So manipulating numbers between 9,000,000 (where one of my sites that I use for item storage only - not for public consumption) and down to (say) 500,000 should be fairly easy to do with a wee bit of effort.

My gut feel is that anything ranked 200,000 and below in Alexa DOES have good traffic and within the top 100,000 sites you do have a reasonable relative ranking of traffic.

I also use compete.com and quantcast.com to check traffic ... they are very popular with advertisers although are a bit US centric. These sites also use a mix of toolbars, SE data, and loaded widgets.

In the main I have found that they correlate with Alexa at the busy end of the spectrum - and certainly it seems to put my sites in rough order of their public viewing numbers.

I'll put out a challenge :

Does anyone have an example of a busy site (say getting 10,000+ pages read per day) that is NOT in Alexa's top 100,000 rankings?

I'd be interested to see if there is such a site.
If not then I will say that suggests that Alexa works well enough.

[Smoking]

how about u put up a site with 1 page of crap and i make it rank top 100k lol i need 1 week to do it !! make sure ur host can take the POUNDing of fake traffic i will be sending

I'll put out a challenge :

Does anyone have an example of a busy site (say getting 10,000+ pages read per day) that is NOT in Alexa's top 100,000 rankings?

I'd be interested to see if there is such a site.
If not then I will say that suggests that Alexa works well enough.

[Simmo!]

I'll put out a challenge :

Does anyone have an example of a busy site (say getting 10,000+ pages read per day) that is NOT in Alexa's top 100,000 rankings?

Yup I do. I have a 2 year old site that gets around 25,000 page loads a day and doesn't even rank in the Top 500,000 on Alexa.

[TheGooner]

Simmo - 25K per day is great traffic.
Name the site - don't be shy.

[TheGooner]

Smoking - Are you going to do that each and every day?

Alexa shows daily, weekly, monthly patterns that would flag that up.
You might manage a top 100K for a week - but it would not hide the obvious traffic blips - nor would you get a 100K rating.
You'd need to do it for 3 months I beleive.

[Smoking]

would be done to get the ranking you want .Then u would have to do light maintainance daily for a few hours etc Many a site that have used these dark methods . There is now way a site 1-2 weeks old ( even a month or 2)could be a better rank then a truely aged well visited site that has steady true traffic ! Alexa Ranking are to easily "fixed"