A little History Of Alexa Rank:-
Founded in 1996, Alexa is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com (acquired by Amazon in 1999) that specializes in providing commercial web traffic data gathered via various toolbars and web browser extensions. Some of Alexa’s most notable earlier activities include giveing a table that served as the basis for the formation of the Wayback Machine and the establishment of various search facilities.‘Alexa Rank’ – is a metric that ranks websites in order of popularity or ‘how [well] a website is doing’ over the last 3 months is the thing they’re probably best known for.How are Alexa Ranks measured?
According to the official Alexa website’s Our Data page, the rank is calculated using a ‘combination’ of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months – with the site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews being ranked as #1. The data is collected from a subset of internet users using one of 25,000 browser extensions for either Google Chrome, Firefox, and/or Internet Explorer. A data then ‘corrects’ for various hidden biases and struggle to pay for visitors who might not be in Alexa’s analysis panel and assigns the data based on the geographical location of visitors.How can I view a website’s Alexa Rank?
At least this part is direct: simply go to the authenticative Alexa website, type in your full domain name and hit return! What’s more, scroll down the results page admit no end of other attractive metrics, such as Bounce Rate, Daily Pageviews per Visitor, Daily Time on Site and the Percentage of visits from Search, as well as individual Demographics, a list of sites that link and even page speed/load times!What does the Alexa Rank mean?
The general consensus seems to be a reluctant admittance by most (certainly not all) that there does indeed appear to be a very general – rough – correlation between a site’s Alexa Rank and traffic for well-settled websites that receive over and above a certain level of traffic: i.e. for relatively popular sites with Alexa Ranks of less than somewhere in the region of about 50,000 to 100,000 – to their credit, Alexa does actually state on their website that ‘traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as [very?] rough estimates‘ and that conversely ‘the closer a site gets to #1, the more accurate traffic rankings become‘. Anything higher than this 100,000 waypoint and everyone I’ve ever spoken to on the subject seems to pretty much laugh it off as a metric that can, nine times out of ten, be almost completely ignored.Why don’t people tend to trust it?
It seems that a lot of people/webmasters with access to reliable web analytics data (the most popular being provided by Google Analytics of course) for more than one website often report seeing web-traffic trends and statistics that appear to be completely out of line with the corresponding Alexa Rank for each site. Unfortunately, you’ve only got to Google something like ‘Is Alexa Rank Accurate?’ to find such reports – not good! Although, in all fairness, quite a few of these reports are for websites with quite high Alexa Ranks – i.e. often way in excess of the 100,000 mark.The real kicker though, seems to be two-fold: 1) Alexa aren’t able to gather their data from everybody (they obviously simply don’t have access to everybody’s browsing habits) – they can only gather data from a subset of a few million users via certain browser extensions (as previously mentioned) – something common sense suggests will almost certainly skew the data right from the get-go (since the average user presumably arguably isn’t likely to have installed any such browser extensions) and 2) rather than address such concerns head on and be completely open about exactly how this particular problem is accounted for, i.e. by being more open about exactly how the underlying data is collected and used to calculate the rank, Alexa seem to (as far as my admittedly somewhat limited research goes) be less than 100% transparent on the matter, simply stating that Alexa Rank ‘is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months’.
