Alexa Traffic Rankings

I’ve had several clients come to me that are concerned about their poor Alexa Rankings. How they even found out about Alexa is a mystery, however they have the notion set in their minds that they must be ranked much higher in order to have a successful website.

For those of you who don’t know what Alexa is:

The Alexa Toolbar offers the unique ability to update in real-time to offer you information about the sites you visit.

The Alexa Traffic Ranking, which is obtained from the statistics of users with the Alexa Toolbar installed, is most often used to get the traffic rank of a particular website. For example, the traffic rank of this website, www.semtek.net, which includes the sub-domain www.sem-hong-kong.semtek.net is 6,743,460 which by any standard is very poor.

There are several, very good reasons for this poor ranking:

• I no longer use the Alexa Toolbar due to its inconsistency in compatibility with certain websites. These websites would simply return an error code and not load.
• I do not have the Alexa Toolbar installed.
• Many of my clients or potential clients visiting my website have not heard of Alexa, do not have the toolbar installed and therefore do not register as a visitor to my site.
• The site is about one month old (come back in several months and it will be higher).

Notice that most of these reasons are due to whether or not the visitors have the Alexa Toolbar installed. This is therefore a very unreliable tool since most people with the toolbar installed are somewhat tech-savvy, therefore certain websites will rank higher than others when really that may not be the case.

Alexa is a great idea and it is a shame that it cannot be more reliable as it would provide valuable feedback for anyone wanting to know how their website compares to other websites worldwide.

Another flaw in Alexa is that it can be easily tricked into thinking that your website is more popular than it really is. By installing the Alexa Toolbar and visiting your website daily, you can easily boost your visibility to around 250,000. There is also a piece of Javascript code that can be inserted into your website to make Alexa believe that more people are visiting your website pushing your ranking above 50,000.

This just goes to show that Alexa is not a tool that can be relied upon heavily. For a quick idea of your website ranking, sure, pop in to www.Alexa.com and see how it is ranked, but don’t rely on its ranking as a measure of your website’s success. On the disclaimers page you can read more about Alexa’s accuracy:

The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population.

Until Alexa is bought out by Google and installed on the Google toolbar, which provides a much broader audience, Alexa is just another gimmick in the world of Search Engine Optimisation. 

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.