ChetanAlexa, a web information company which is a tool used by webmasters to check the websites rankings based on the traffic it receives. There are more than 10 million websites ranked by alexa in a fashion of number of visitors to the website on an average.
At present, yahoo.com is ranked as no. 1 and google is no. 2 in the world wide web when rated according to traffic to the websites.
The tool can be accurate when trying to rank websites with very high traffic, but when it comes to low traffic sites, this tools is rated as inaccurate by me, and i see many webmasters judging it as an inaccurate tool as it does not rank websites by checking the actual number of unique visitors to the website.
- A small test on this can explain better:
I have a celebrity website where most of the visitors are normal people and not webmasters, and most of the normal internet users might not have any alexa related toolbar to their browser. That website receives about 800 unique visitors per day in an average, but still its alexa ranking is about 800000. - The 2nd website is a webmaster related blog where most of the visitors might be webmasters who would have installed alexa toolbars to their browsers. The blog receives just about 250 unique visitors a day but has got a good alexa of nearly 200000.
A rough conclusion is that alexa ranking mainly depends on the presence or absense of alexa toolbars to the browsers. If this comes true, this single point can judge that alexa ranking is completely inaccurate.
Infact there were many instances where people are claiming Alexa to be useless and inaccurate, like at Techcrunch discussing about Youtube and Google Alexa amd Google blogoscoped shown differently in Alexa and lot more.
So do you still believe in Alexa?
Btw Text-Link-Ads.com, a big company related to text link advertising deals with buyers and sellers of links, and pricing depends on page strength whose main factor is Alexa ranking.
So decide before buying links in TLA.
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Hmm…sometimes I doubt Alexa ranking’s truthfulness. Many said that your rank will increase if you install their toolbar. I did, and my website’s rank really increased. It sounds good, but it’s dubious because I don’t see much increase in traffic in my web trackers.
Well thats because Alexa is a 3rd party tracker and does not install any code in your websites to track the visitors count. This is the very reason you can increase your rank by adding its toolbar on your browser or adding alexa widget in your website pages.
Alexa is OK if you want a quick and rough traffic estimate, otherwise it’s pretty useless.
I do not refer Alexa much but still i have installed the toolbar for a rough estimate about the website m surfing
Puneet’s last blog post..Adsense Income for month of March
alexa is nothing.. but for some it is still important because some advertisers uses alexa as the basis of pricing.
Hussein’s last blog post..Pinoy Contestants of SEOcontest2008
I have to agree with Hussian.
I find that many people who are submitting too web directories watch your Alexa stats. But, the larger picture is more traffic and not worry about Alexa and PR so much.
Spend more time building backlinks, SEO and good content…
Squeaky’s last blog post..Guest Bloggers - How They Make a Difference in Your Blog
it really depends, some advertiser really look into alexa first while second thought on google traffic.
david cheong’s last blog post..Lucky Winner in Contest (March 2008)
Alexa was never really important to me, but it’s still fun to read about it any day.
Modern Street’s last blog post..Updated in PageRank, Alexa and WordPress
Well I see that this post is written before Alexa April Update 2008. Earlier alexa’s ranking was based by the behaviour of visitors who were using alexa toolbar that time. As Alexa is web information related company so most of the toolbar owners were webmasters. That means as webmaster visits sites/blogs of his niche the respective site ranked higher.
But after update we all have seen drastic changes in rankings and now the sources for traffic stats gathering have been changed for alexa.
Now it can be seen as fair play website for judging the outline of website’s traffic.