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Is this going to provide us with more useful information to assess to see how our a site of ours is doing? Where do the stats come from? Google's crawl or does Amazon have their own crawler to get this info?
Since the results are the same as on Google.com I assume that the numbers are from Google and they are used to help determine PR or used inconjunction with PR to determine your rank.
I've talked enough, what are your thoughts?
[edited by: Marcia at 4:22 am (utc) on April 15, 2004]
[edit reason] All links have to be clickable. [/edit]
Anyway, just my $0.02. I don't have the Alexa toolbar installed on my computer now, but I played with it a little bit back in the day.
And I quote:
PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a "random surfer" who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting "back" but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page.The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.
Where this theory totally falls apart is really is in the area of topic popularity.
For example let's say two sites link to my site. One of those sites is a PR9 scientific paper from harvard that receives 100 visitors a day and the other is a PR4 Britney Spears Picture site that receives 5000 visitors per day.
Guess which site has a higher probability of sending me a visitor?
This also applies for sites that use tracking counters on their outgoing links. I have sites that get way more traffic from low PR sites that have high traffic but low PR because every link in/out goes through a script.
I think the theory is pretty sound.
MrSpeed - wouldn't the PR4 page jump up in PR pretty quick if it was so popular that everyone linked to it?
Pick just about any topic on the Lycos 50 or the Yahoo Buzz index and I would venture to say that a PR4 page on any of those topics gets way more traffic than a PR9 academic paper.
Therefore there is a higher probability that the random surfer will visit my site from the Britney Spears site.
Of course this theory gets a little skewed depending on what the topic of my site is. If my site is also an acedemic paper and the text link clearly says this then the Britney Spears fans may not be that interested.
There may be a higher probability that I receive visitors from the PR9 site.
greg
11 alexa visits a day are needed to get in the top 20,000. If you just install the toolbar and surf 80 of your pages a day it has the same effect.
I'm a bit skeptical about that, but in any case, I wonder how many owners of quality sites would devote the time required to surf 80 pages daily from now till kingdom come? That sounds like an amateur's game--although I do remember when FORBES reported how About.com tried something that obvious a few years ago by buying text-page popunders on a third-party site to fool MediaMetrix's rating system.
[edited by: europeforvisitors at 8:57 pm (utc) on April 15, 2004]
how many owners of quality sites would devote the time required to surf 80 pages daily
They don't have to - they just use a macro tool in conjunction with their browser.
I have two sites that receive 1500 visitors per day, each.
Currently, I am working intensly with one of them and I have the Alexa toolbar installed. That site is a top 100,000 in Alexa. The other, which is already built so I don't visit it much, is almost a 200,000. Both receive almost the same traffic.
Alexa traffic ranking isn't worth anything in itself
As mentioned some people use it as a selling point. I have had people say they will not list in my directory because of my alexa number.
What is important, though, is that the Alexa data is becomming more visable. Not only is it included in A9, but Amazon plans to make it widely available through their web services.
The more they dessiminate the data the more people will use them, not realizing that the data suck.
In any case, I haven't seen any evidence of widespread Alexa spamming in my category. I suspect that it goes on mostly among amateur Webmasters who think they're going to get more out of it than they actually do.
well, there is certainly a lot of alexa spamming going on, also in (semi-)professional areas. just have a look into the "movers and shakers" section of alexa.
eg. there's a new chinsese portal site (PR1!) which emerged from nowhere in march to a global 190 now!
There is even a 'customer' review telling how easy it is to shop on my "small" site and how well Amazon took care of it all. My 'small' site (almost 2000 pages) has no customers as it is non-commercial. I see Alexa - and its rankings - highly deceptive.
Katarina
I monitored rating for my site for last month or so, and even though number of visitors has remained almost same, ratings have fluctuated between about 100,000 to 1,500,000.
Moreover, since number of pages visited is also a factor in rating, it is an incentive to break up one page material into, say 20.
If you are comparing two forum sites, it might make sense as an indicator of popularity.
However, if you are comparing two directory sites, it is actually a reverse indicator of usability. For example, if my widget directory helps you find the information you are looking for in only two pages, but my competitors site is so poorly organized that it takes 6 pages to find the same information, and we both have the same number of alexa visitors - my competitor will have a much better alexa rating.
Average page views per visitor has entirely different meanings depending on the type of site.
Moreover, since number of pages visited is also a factor in rating, it is an incentive to break up one page material into, say 20.
It shouldn't be much of an incentive unless you expect a higher Alexa traffic ranking to pay off for you in some way. The time spent on breaking pages into tiny chunks for Alexa could be invested more productively in creating new content.
One other point:
There's no such thing as an accurate traffic rating or ranking system for the Web, so it's always a good idea to rely on multiple sources of information. In my category, for example, I find that Alexa and Metrics Market provide different views of a site's Web traffic, but most of the time they move roughly in parallel. So, even though Alexa's rankings may be approximate and Metrics Market understates my own traffic by nearly a third, I can get a useful picture of my traffic in comparison to that of competitors by using both tools if the numbers from both services aren't wildly out of synch.
Something better than PR to see how you're doing?
so far we've got:
alexa (-> www.alexa.com, alexa toolbar)
google pagerank (-> google toolbar)
yahoo webrank (-> yahoo toolbar)
metrics market (->www.metricsmarket.com)
plus, for large websites, media measurers such as media metrix and nielsen netratings and auditors such as the members of the international federation of audit bureaux of circulations (www.ifabc.org).
anything else to judge a site's success and reach?
ps. thank you very much europeforvisitors, for the great find of metrics market! was new to me.
Not public anyway, but look at who owns the majority of the backbone and routers. THey know just about EVERYTHING.
I'm a bit skeptical about that, but in any case, I wonder how many owners of quality sites would devote the time required to surf 80 pages daily from now till kingdom come? That sounds like an amateur's game--although I do remember when FORBES reported how About.com tried something that obvious a few years ago by buying text-page popunders on a third-party site to fool MediaMetrix's rating system.
I recorded the user agent of every single visitor to my site for over a year. When i was averaging about 20k in alexa that required 11 visitors a day. You can accomplish 20k ranking in alexa yourself by installing the tool bar and browsing 80 pages a day.
