What Is Alexa Ranking And Why Is It Sometimes Important?

Alexa Ranking is a way of comparing your website’s traffic to every other website on the planet. The lower the ranking, the better off you are, so sites with rankings of 1 and 2 are MySpace and Google, and brand new sites have rankings of 4,000,000+.

How Does It Work

The main way Alexa gathers its data is through the Alexa toolbar. While there may be other methods, this is the main one. The toolbar is available for IE and Firefox, and may also be out for other browsers (seems like Opera has one).

The toolbar basically sends a query up to Alexa HQ every time you load a site. That site’s Alexa ranking will change depending on how many queries it gets that day. It will then average every thing and give you averages for the week and the past 3-month period as well.

How Accurate Is It

Not very. One reason is the only people who use the toolbar are webmasters, so tech sites will usually rank much higher than other sites, even if the other sites get more traffic.

To show how inaccurate it is, in the past 3 months (the same 3 months that have seen the biggest growth here), the Alexa ranking isn’t any better than it was in Feb/March/April, despite the fact the blog’s traffic has greatly increased. This is just a rough graph, it isn’t supposed to be scientifically accurate:

That simply means people who used the Alexa toolbar visited much more back then than they do now. Months back it actually peaked at around 50k, according to the weekly average it is at 170k today, but my website’s traffic is at least 5 times higher than it was when it peaked. Try figuring that one out.

Many other Webmasters complain about the same thing happening to them.

Why Is It So Inaccurate?

The difference that one or two extra Alexa users can make is amazing. I suspect the reason Nusuni Dot Com’s rankings dropped off like that is because one or two users who used the toolbar stopped using it or stopped visiting.

Plus it is easy to game, so some sites may be ranked higher because of a crooked webmaster.

Why Is It Important?

Advertisers and people looking to buy a site seem to rely too much on inaccurate data tools for figuring out how much a site is “worth”. In their mind Blog A that has a PageRank of 5 and an Alexa rank of 50,000 is more valuable than Blog B that has a PR of 4 and an Alexa Rank of 80,000, even if Blog B has a more active community, etc.

If you ever reach the point of getting sponsors (directly, not through something like Adsense) then you should release your traffic figures, and maybe even give an estimate of how much traffic is from search engines, direct type ins, etc. All of that data is much more accurate than anything Alexa, Compete, or similar services can provide.

Another thing to keep in mind is many ad programs/paid review sites use your Alexa Rank as a factor for accepting/denying you.

Are There Any Accurate Ways To Compare Sites?

Text-Link-Ads has a calculator called the Blog Juice calculator. It uses multiple data sources, including Alexa, to come up with a final number. If you keep track of the numbers you can somewhat accurately measure your blog’s (and competing blog’s) growth. You can use it to compare sites as well.

Stay tuned for more Back To The Basics posts.

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