Multiple people have written to us asking about the Alexa site ranking system.
Many wish to know our opinion of the system, some wish to know our thoughts on
what they see projected from Alexa about their own website.
Many business and website owners have noted that the measurement shown on Alexa for the site they own does not match the website's internal site usage reports.
Others have reported to us that the Alexa report changes dramatically for their site,
when the website's usage statistics report on their server shows little or no changes to the norm.
Our personal experience has agreed with most of the above statements. We have watched our site's usage reports indicate a constant rise in viewers at our website, while watching our Alexa report spin out of control in all directions.
Our Alexa report showed our ranking at the 200,000 range. Shortly thereafter we noted the ranking was (down) to over 500,000 - which should mean our site visitor count had dramatically dropped. However, when looking at our websites internal usage stats, quite the opposite was true. Our numbers had risen by approximately 6% for that time period.
At the time of writing this report, I checked our Alexa report to find we are currently at the 6,000,000 + ranking position. WOW! With that change you would think our site had lost all appeal and closed up shop. However, our internal site usage report shows an average of 10k unique visitors per month currently, and this number does not include bot/spider/crawler traffic. While we have watched steady growth at our website each month, we have watched our Alexa ranking plunge into the deepest darkness of cyberspace and back again, numerous times.
If you speak to Alexa, they will tell you their results are highly accurate.
If you speak to anyone else you will find there is much discrepancy and controversy over the program. Most will tell you that it lacks a scientific approach to an accurate rating system, and the results shown by Alexa will not be true of a probable conclusion, because it relies solely on the web habits of those who download their toolbar.
Here are some things you may not know:
! Only users with the Alexa toolbar are used to calculate their statistics. The IE browser is the main source of statistic input to Alexa. They have sidebar addons for Mozilla and Netscape but these are not commonly used.
Firefox, the #1 Browser - has no Alexa toolbar available that reports usage stats to Alexa. I have found some Alexa add-ons for Firefox but they only report FROM Alexa - they do not send information TO Alexa, so Firefox Browser users do not affect your ranking at all.
At our own site the % of visitors, using Alexa supported browsers is well below 50%. The number IE users with the Alexa toolbar coming to our site would appear to be (by Alexa's own reporting) nil or next to it. (shown by their ranking statistics).
Therefore, the report that Alexa shows for our site (and probably your own) is unsubstantiated and is highly inaccurate. It has been proven (in our own research, for our own site) to be well beyond the boundaries of being even close to accurate. While this may not be the case for the very top sites on the internet,
or for those who force their users to use the Alexa toolbar to up their Alexa ratings, it has proven to be very true with us and the general population of websites.
Why do so few people really use the Alexa toolbar?
We have heard multiple reasons expressed - The #1 reason seems to be that almost all anti-virus programs will alert users to the Alexa toolbar. Because Alexa gathers information on the surfing habits of those using the toolbar, spyware programs
detect it as being spyware. Alexa has addressed this, assuring their users that
the information gathered does not contain personal information and is only used
aggregately for information purposes.
The #2 reason that so few people use the Alexa toolbar is so many people have worked away from the IE web browser and the majority of users now prefer Firefox
or other browsers that are more stabile and allow users to blocks scripts and advertisements more reliably.
The #3 reason that so few people use the Alexa toolbar would be so few know about it or care about it. Very few internet users care about site statistics... unless they do business on the internet and wish to pay attention to the competition and their own ranking web-wide.
I have heard of multiple sites that manipulate their ranking on Alexa by making it a must for their members to download the Alexa Toolbar. Still other website owners will work with other webmasters, to work the system on the behalf of one another. Personally, I do not have that much spare time, nor interest.
On our site you will find links to allow one to download our customized Alexa toolbar.
We make this available but as you can see by the placement of the link (at the bottom of the page, in small text) that we have no intention of pushing the use of the toolbar on our visitors. If someone wishes to have Alexa rankings available for every site they visit, the add on is available. If they do not - no worries.
My suggestion to business and website owners is - Don't fret about it!
You can (or should be able to) access the true statistic reports from your
webserver, which should be broken down into bots and human viewers for you.
Use these statistics - share them openly and honestly with your advertisers - and let them decide. Do not let the Alexa ranking you show presently worry you.
It will fluctuate back and forth, even when your site traffic has remained steady.
This does not mean you have done something wrong.
However! If you wish to bring your Alexa ranking up (by bringing it down) - simply download the toolbar, browse your own website each day using it, and within a month or 3 you will find your rankings on Alexa have dramatically skyrocketed! [I did this as a test for ONE week! and brought our ranking from over 6,000,000 down to 739,096 - I kid you not!] - remember the lower the number the better on Alexa.
I have heard it rumored recently that Google is or soon will be paying attention to sites that show higher rankings by Alexa and that Google is/will be indexing sites faster when they have higher results at Alexa. While I have nothing to base the accuracy of this information on at the time of publication, I will only report it as rumor at this point and leave it to you to research and accept or deny. If it is a true statement, then this would give me more appreciation for Alexa ranking and add more incentive to see a higher Alexa rank.
>>> Click Here for the Web Analytics Spider. This software will quickly display the number of pages Indexed By Google, pages on the server, Link Popularity, And Alexa Rank, Plus A Summary Report With Page Rank Stats for any site you wish.
