Alexa

A flaw in ranking...

[MHes]

Hi

Thought you would be interested in some idle research whilst waiting for the google update....

Alexa ranking : page views per day
63,137 ~5000
113,860 ~6000
119,507 ~3000
132,511 ~2000
188,557 ~3000
218,528 ~3000
313,819 ~7000
325,993 ~1500
461,111 ~1000
540,711 ~1000
611,124 ~1500
638,653 ~600
729,150 ~900
769,286 ~200
865,961 ~1000
866,901 ~1000
909,055 ~400
1,821,498 ~700

... spot the anomalies!

Sites are all 'comparable' in theme and I used old pageview data to try and match data Alexa would have.

The rankings are screwed by cachability of pages. The less likely a sites pages will be cached by a proxy server or browser, the higher the alexa ranking.

Hmmmm

[jeremy goodrich]

Yes, the Alexa rankings are very unreliable for sites that are down further in the list.

Perhaps the data is better when it gets to the top 500 or so...WebmasterWorld gets a lot of traffic, and is pretty close to the top 500, I think. :) Something like 505.

Those are interseting numbers, though - thanks for sharing them.

[Chris_R]

I think he is suggesting that having your pages be uncacheable will possible result in a higher ranking.

I can sort of see the logic, but you might want to make the comparison with visitors instead of page views.

I don't think it should work that way, but...

[MHes]

Chris R

Interestingly the top site:

Ranking 63,137 ~5000 pageviews per day

gets around 6500 uniques per day! The pages all appear in the serps and a visitor need go no further for information. ISP Proxy caching causes the pageview count on our raw logs to be lower than the actual ip visitor count. We monitor click outs for each page (its a niche directory) and keep a record of ip addresses, so we have a very accurate record of actual people.

If we made this site 'dynamic' I reckon we would show a MUCH better ranking, which could be a good marketing tool....... but try explaining all this to a potential client!