How important is Alexa?

[citypublife]

I would be interested to know how the professionals value Alexa rankings.

In theory it seems to be a good idea and (if accurate) a valuable resource. But:-

Is it accurate?
Is it realistic?
Is it a valuable indication of how popular your websites really are?
Does anybody know the secrets behind their algorithm?
How many websites does it measure? (I've heard 16.6 million).
How many times a month do you check your ranking?
Rating 1 for not important and 10 for very important. - How important is their ranking to you?


Many thanks for your replies.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[fathom]

There is some useful information there, but also a severe bias.

[citypublife]

Fathom

Biased? for/against what?
What information is "useful"?
If some information is viable. Why did you vote a resounding no... Please elaborate.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[Runawayrentals]

I honestly find it quite horrid. I really hope those stats arent used for anything more then the graphics Alexa sets up. I have found that buy installing alexa toolbar you can alter your own rankings. Its not pretty. I tried that months ago and worked took my rankings form 90K area to 40K area in 2 weeks. I got rid of it and havent been back. It no longer even intrigues me. Especially since on one site you can tell the employees have it install, as it tells you what pages/sections are viewed most and its /admin/ so I tried to view it and you must login for that section yet the entire site is a no-login site... That site has a rank of about 2500.

[Jamie]

I do not think it is very meaningful . For a short period of time I was using one of the smaller pay per click programs that advertised on Alexa. My site was only 2 months old and I was under 50k when I stopped the advertising I went up to 200k.
Jamie

[citypublife]

Runawayrentals "...Especially since on one site you can tell the employees have it install, as it tells you what pages/sections are viewed most and its /admin/ so I tried to view it and you must login for that section yet the entire site is a no-login site... That site has a rank of about 2500."

Please explain the above quote. It doesn't make sense. Thanks.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[DylanW]

It's essentially biased towards people who have Alexa installed. I'm not exactly sure what group this would be, but I'm assuming it's at least in part webmasters, since it's got a lot of stats, which can be helpful to webmasters.

I downloaded it quite some time ago after reading an article about it. I haven't gotten rid of it, just because I haven't really thought about it much (lots of other stuff to worry about :)). It's probably good as a spot-check for how you're doing traffic-wise, but, as has been said before, if you keep it installed you're likely to get some inflated stats (you're going to be going back to your own site a lot, especially if you've got it as your home page, as I do at work).

Our site is continually in the 60k range in terms of rank. I can't remember how high it was when I first installed Alexa, but it seems like it's gone up a few 10k in rank. Part of this may be natural, but then again part of this may be because it's installed.

As for overall usefulness, I don't think it does that much, except in the way of curiosity. You can check reviews, if anyone writes them. You can get a Traffic Rank stat, but as I said, that's a rough estimate and can be inflated. You can also get a Backlink count, but it's nothing you can't get on Google or several other search engines.

My vote: Undecided.

[Runawayrentals]

citypublife....

Let see if I can make this more clear....

On Alexa, they have a section under this sites "stats" that shows what are the heaviest hit pages by those who are giving Alexa ranking, those pages are administrative pages, only accessible by webmaster and or others who are working on ths site. It is the #1 viewed pages out of 5 sections listed. Which with the webmasters, administrative people using the tool bar, has gotten them a very very low ranking in the 2-3K rank.

Hope this was clear enough.

[fathom]

Runawayrentals has the right idea, the tool bar (client side) and the alexa banner/search box on server side (site).

Sites with search/banner boxes are categorically rated "higher" even if they only have a few visitors per day, and a site that get 10,000 a day visitors can be rated low (below 1 million) if no alexa banner/search box and few toolbars are used by visitors.

Useful info - generally speaking industry competitors often have similar markets therefore a competitor site rated higher than your is likely getting more visitation and a site rated lower is likely getting less (margin of error unknown).

But data is not uniform across all industries and markets e.g. WPW rank is low at 4600 with 11,000 members, SEOChat with 2,200 (and alot less daily posts) is at 1100.

Whereas a site I manage in earth science/education is still at 211,000 rating and 8-10K visitation a day.

A little bogus IMO.

[OldKentucky]

Alexa is incredibly biased if you are dependent on it of stats. Judging that Alexa=webmasters and Amazon buyers, that alienates a good percentage of the web.

Its site rankings may be useful, but I wouldn't bet the farm on them.

[swstyles]

From what we have seen, only web firms have ever used Alexa. I have not come across a single person using it that wasn't involved in the web somehow. I think Alexa is irrelevant. It doesn't help get visitors to your site so what's the point.

[cohwill]

I have to agree that Alexa is not useful. It's rankings are only based on the number of people who are using the Alexa toolbar.

A better place to look at one's rankinge is IxQuick.com. IxQuick is a metasearch engine that covers the smaller search engines. It gives the rankings of sites at the bottom of each result.

[Reece]

I agree to some extent.... those who use Alexa are involved in the web... BUT... recently a web client asked about it, because another designer claimed to be in the top 500 websites in the world ~ (not) and we did some comparisons of sites.

I explained the traffic they showed was based on ALEXA/AMAZON.com toolbar users.... I was able to show him how its was not always indicative of real traffic, but that it has the potential to show a sites placement in the big picture.

I will say this ... on a personal note... This last week someone has been flooding the reviews for my personal website with false and inflammatory reviews. There is no appeal procedure listed on Alexa and no way to opt out of the review process.

For me, Alexa just became worthless......

[citypublife]

A better place to look at one's rankings is IxQuick.com.

As far as I could tell from IxQuick.com. It only gives relevance ratings to keywords typed into the search. (I've never used it before so correct me if I'm wrong).

I have to disagree with many of the posts on this thread. I am no expert on Alexa but can only pass on what I have found.

According to Internetseer, Alexa measure around 17 million websites worldwide. (A pretty good size sample).

Alexa claim that..." traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of users and pageviews is ranked #1."

I tried testing its accuracy with regards my site. This is only over three weeks, but nevertheless here are the results.

My server stats say that between 4th and 11th August I had 1,950 "Distinct Hosts Served". = about 278 per day. Alexa, give or take a day or two said that I averaged (on the days I checked). 15 unique visitors per million. If they measure 17 million sites, that's 15 x 17 = 255 per day. Pretty close.

The following week, my server said 192 per day and Alexa said 187. and last week the figures were 223 and 215 respectively. I would call that pretty accurate.

I do understand that there is a time lag with updating of Alexa and sometimes I've known it not to update for over a week. However, I believe the results are close enough for me to consider using it as a valuable tool for measuring my progress in the Internet community and comparing my own progress against previous stats each week.

It's a bit more difficult to measure the accuracy of page views.

Now I can already here the fingers tapping on the keyboard spitting out. "They only take into account Alexa toolbars users". My answer is simply, "So What?" show me another tool that gives you a decent comparison of websites covering around 17 million web users. Googles 1 - 10 rating is hardly a measurable source of information.

With regards another earlier post:..."I have found that by installing alexa toolbar you can alter your own rankings. Its not pretty. I tried that months ago and worked took my rankings form 90K area to 40K area in 2 weeks."

Could it be that without the toolbar they are ranking you with estimated worldwide users and with the toolbar they rank you against the lower figure of 17 million.

They do not hide the fact that they measure Alexa toolbar users. In addition to pointing out it's "biases" they add...."the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa's data come from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes."

I'm not suggesting it's perfect but I have yet to see a better ranking tool that enables you to independently measure your progress.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[OSFan]

The problem with Alexa is that it's not a fair representation of the whole population. To get a perfect view, you would have to take a random sample from around the world and monitor their usage.

What this software does, is monitor those with the Alexa toolbar installed. Now, depending on how many languages the Alexa toolbar is offered in, and for how many Operating Systems and browsers, one can see just how inaccurate the sample is.

So who gets monitored?

Windows Users, with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer who speak English.

There are less than, but still many users of other Windows browsers, as well as browsers for other Operating Systems. These people are left out.

Take a Linux website. Most of it's visitors are Linux users on Linux. That website is going to have a very poor ranking, even though 99% of Linux users might visit it daily. The same goes for other Operating Systems and browsers.

It's not a fair representation, and I believe it to be highly inaccurate. I don't take notice of the ranking at all.

The new speed feature doesn't appear to be updated often.

The incoming links section is very inaccurate. It uses a google tool, but between them they never appear to get it right. You can search for how many pages link to www.mywebsite.com and you get 5. Then type www.mywebsite.com into google and click "contain the term" and you get say 15 who link.

As for the reviews, this feature now appears to be stable, at one time it was mixing reviews for different websites up, and even after they cleared that up, the starts didn't reset, so a website with no reviews may have had 5 starts.

The quality of reviews depends on how many people know about Alexa and turn their to review your website. Many people don't like to spend time reviewing sites, they go, read, take actions, and go elsewhere, they don't stop to give feedback.

[Gary Golden]

I don't use their toolbar on my browser but I use Alexa as a basis for ranking other sites, this is used in correlation with Marketleap.com and Google.
Yes this service is similar to the google ranking system. No one should base their entire decision on any one service but by using part of each you can thus make a better business decision.
I have several websites all up and down the spectrum so I feel yes Alexa's rankings are relevant when used in conjunction with other ranking services such as Google and Marketleap. Of course then a little common sense on quality.
I personally feel that most people do not understand the net and the value of links, site volume etc.. When a site is ranked by Alexa at over a million, then you go to check marketleap.com and they have under 100 links and they are telling you they have over 100,000 visitors a month. I say! yeah right. At least now by using the combination of the 3 you can make a some what intelligent decision on advertising or hiring someone to do your marketing.
Knowing what you know now would you hire someone for marketing your site who has a site ranked at let's say for ranking purposes of 1.7 million. I don't think so!! They can BS me all they want but I don't care if they have a P4. If they are ranked that high then they don't have any visitors and if they don't have visitors why would you hire them to get you visitors.
Grant it if your site is ranked under 300k their could be some variation is your using a Alexa toolbar it might help a little but you don't use Alexa to increase your ranking but to look at others rankings.
If Alexa ranks a site at 25,000 and you go to marketleap and they have 20 links then flags should go up in your head that yes! these people are using a toolbar and probably every one in the office is using the toolbar because their is no way that a site is going to have a ranking of 25,000 with only 25 or even 50 links unless they are paying major bucks on advertising.
Just my 2 cents worth!

[otronix]

Hi
I am a Web master
With 7 client whom I serve.
abeit I agree with the pros and cons regarding alexa
But would like to add its still a useful tool
Even though it is biased for sites with low traffic

Being a South African, it is even more biased since few south Africans Have Alexa ... or so it would seem

But once you recieve higer volumes of traffic.
It becomes relevant.

The following stats are a rough estimate but should illustrate the point

www.5fm.co.za and www.highveld.co.za are competing
radio stations they rank about 50K Aardvark.co.za and Ananzi are our top serach directories one telcom owned the other private they are ranked about 2k

I say give credit where credit is due.
Alexa does help, and even new comers to web design like myself are finding it useful

[mm99]

One search tool that I use all the time is the Arrow search. It searches the majors and will give you a very good idea where you stand in the wonderful world of metaland. It can be d/l at:
http://www.rt-software.co.uk/arrow_search/

I use it on a daily basis, but I do seo work and maintain a number of my own sites as well. I still use other metas including Ixquick but still like the arrow search the best and is my first line of knowledge.

I have also assembled some of the tools I use at:
http://www.usnet.tk/
Included are submits, validators, metas, various tests mostly geared toward SEO work.

Do give the arrow search a try. You'll see what I'm talking about.

peace...Paul

[eProducts]

Alexa is useful but you cannot take their ranking too seroiusly. Our main site, www.eproducts.com is ranked by them and fluctuates wildly. As of last check, tonight, just cause I saw this thread, was 1.7 million. Two weeks ago it was 700,000 a week before that it was 2.5 million...
I'm not sure of their allog. process. I can tell you we have never paid them a dime, nor ever spoke with them. We host our own servers so It's not a favor to MS or Interland... Our internal reports show we receive ~ 25,000 active visits a day which is no where near what they report.

[eProducts]

One thing I forgot.

We are a Unix site. If it matters. Not sure.

[citypublife]

eProducts

Alexa admit that calculations over 100,000 are innacurate and the further you are away from this figure the more innacurate they become.

You claim to be receiving "25,000 active visits a day". Yet your own stats show that you have had 111,409 total visits. Alexa rank your site as 1,157,711 and Google rank your site 3.

Our site receive between 250 and 300 unique visitors per day. (over last 4 weeks). We are ranked 4 by Google and 99,797 by Alexa.

This doesn't make sense. I am prepared to accept the "Unix theory" but that does not explain your own stats page. Unless it was added only 4 days ago.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[OSFan]

I estimate between 1000 to 1650 unique visitors a day, althought he stats I use(self written) say a unique visitor is one who has appeared and their IP has been wiped from the IP table, and IPs are only kept upto 15 minutes after inactivity.

My Alexa ranking is about 240 000. Google Page rank was poor last time I checked a long time ago. My site is not hugely linked around the net, which could account for a poor google rank, yet a better traffic ranking from Alexa. This is why we got to cross reference these tools for the best results.

As Alexa just takes info from the browser, such as when you type www.asite.com the alexa toolbar notes this, and sends it to their servers, the hardware the website runs on doesn't matter.

One thing I have seen on Alexa recently is that all the traffic ranking boxes are reading N/A apart from the 3 months on the rank. Did they stop reporting traffic for under 100 000 sites?

[citypublife]

Osfan

It seems Alexa do mess up sometimes, as of a couple of minutes ago my stats looked consistant. However, a couple of days ago it said I'd dropped over 1 million places to 99,797? Which meant my site must have more popular than Google, AOL, MSN and Yahoo put together. :)...I wish.

It is quite usual from what I've seen that sites have N/A. In a couple of days this usually corrects itself and stat numbers change.

As I said in an earlier post. I'ts not perfect but there doesn't seem to be anything else out there for us to compare ourselves with competitors or other sites.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[OSFan]

It is quite usual from what I've seen that sites have N/A. In a couple of days this usually corrects itself and stat numbers change.

Quite right! I just checked my ranking, numbers have appeared again, but huge numbers. 780000 which is too high. My stats show that just recently I have been getting the highest visitors ever, yet my Alexa ranking is going the other way!


As I said in an earlier post. I'ts not perfect but there doesn't seem to be anything else out there for us to compare ourselves with competitors or other sites.

Not perfect, but the best available is what I think you're saying, and it's quite true.

[B Noble]

I skimmed this thread, so if I repeat what someone else posted, send a cyber slap my way.

For the most part, I find Alexa to be quite inaccurate and somewhat amusing. I see it reported that we had a drastic deep drop in traffic a few weeks ago. Not so; if anything our traffic increased. Perhaps Alex went down or all the web designers (the majority of people who surf the web with the Alexa toolbar) surfing the net didn't visit us during that period or had their Alexa toolbar turned off.

I agree that most people who use Alexa and the toolbar are web designers so in effect all Alexa does is measure the amount of traffic you get from other web designers or webmasters not potential customers. ;)

Don't forget too that Alexa supposedly measures only traffic. That means nothing, in my opinion, as traffic must be targeted to be effective and bring you sales. So if you see that your competitor has a great Alexa rating, that doesn't mean their sales are better than yours. That only means more webmasters using the Alexa toolbar are visiting them. Likely to check their rating? LOL (See what I mean by amusing?) Hence, we rarely even consult Alexa.

I should also point out that PestPatrol (Alexa voted #1 pest at PestPatrol) and Adaware consider Alexa spyware/adware because it records things that you do. It will even record text entered into web forms including usernames and passwords if it becomes part of the URL. Hmmm....
http://pestpatrol.com/PestInfo/a/Alexa_Toolbar.asp

[alsoran]

Throughout this thread, guys have supported or opposed alexa. None however has suggested any alternative.

Citypublife is right saying *.."So What?" show me another tool that gives you a decent comparison of websites covering around 17 million web users.*

Many say Google PR is the answer. Nope. PR doesn't give an indication of traffic rank. It only suggets, as I say, the *linkability* of a webpage.

Back to where I started. Any alexa alternative..?