Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
Matt
If so I guess you can inflate your position if you take long enough and visit enough of your own pages ;-)
It is unreliable as a service, and peculiarly biased in a way that only Alexa understands. It has the primary purpose of driving traffic to Amazon.com. All the rest is puffery.
Those chasing Alexa rankings are welcome to do so. I looked at Alexa first 2 years ago and was amused by it. Every test I have done since then bears out the original conclusion; "Waste of effort - Avoid".
yea. who on earth pays attention to alexa rating?
I do, it's surprisingly accurate if you consider the source of their data. It allows me to keep an eye on the competition. I do see the effect on them if I fight my way up on some keywords, which gives me some sadistic pleasure I must admit ;)
Your site does have to be above a certain traffic level however it seems to draw any conclusions and even then common sense won't hurt :)
In reality - most people have better things to do - and it's probably not that easy to boost your ranking to a high level anyhow.
It's a lot more accurate within a niche than most people realise - as you'll find out if you subscribe to an expensive traffic ranking service - and compare the figures.
For free - it's superb.
Alexa gets a bad press from anyone who has looked at the way it works, the way it us up and down like a whore's drawers, the way it is only picking up the IE users who happen to have installed its toolbar, the way it is a marketing tool for Amazon and so much else.
Over the period since it arrived on the scene I have noticed that the people rooting for it have a "good" rating and the people against it have ratings ranging from good to abysmal.
As for the concept of it not being easy to "fix" your rating, and "who would have the time?", simply employ a widget like "ghostmouse" on a spare machine for a few days and watch the rating of "notarealsite dot com" (a site that no-one visits anyway because it has no content) soar. All you need is a page with a load of links to other imnternal site pages, each with a link back to the index page.
Now, if you can do this for a non existent fake site you can do this for an enormous one.
But the real thing is "users do not care"! When was the last time you heard someone say "I must visit snodgrass dot com, it has a superb Alexa ranking"? Yup, you got it. Never.
So, if it pleases your ego, watch your ranking. It does precisely nothing for your business. Just about the only valid use is that if you assume(!) that your visitor population is the same as your competitor's then you will see how many more toolbar hampered people visit their site than yours - maybe.
So Alexa is "good" because all the others are bad? Why that makes perfect sense.
No partnermine that wasn't what I meant. Sorry, I didn't make it clear - I'll try again:
I've monitored more than competing 50 sites in my niche with Alexa for more than 3 years now.
When I first started, it was a revelation to find out who was big and who wasn't. You'd never guess just by looking at them - some crappy looking sites are hugely popular - some superb looking ones are an unvisited wasteland.
Alexa ranked all my sites in the correct order by size - which gave me some faith in the quality of their results.
A few months ago, I subscribed to Hitwise. As you probably know this samples traffic at the ISP - so it's data is much more reliable than Alexa - but it costs thousands of dollars a year.
Guess what? Looking at the traffic Hitwise reports for my 50 competing sites - I found no real surprises.
I'm not saying every single site was ranked indentically - but broadly speaking, the Alexa rankings were pretty good: I already knew who the "players" were, and who were the "also rans".
Alexa has it's limitations, I agree. For one thing it's a self-selected panel of usually "techier than average" users - so figures are distorted when comparing sites across industries.
But my experience show's that WITHIN AN INDUSTRY it's a lot better than most people give it credit for - and that makes it a very useful tool.
There are a lot of webmasters (even here) who couldn't afford, (or justify) thousands of dollars a year on something like Hitwise. For them - Alexa provides a great competitive intelligence service - completely free.
You may be right about being able to manipulate the results very easily - but my experience shows, most people (in my industry at least) don't bother.
As a matter of interest - how high can you go with your manipulated Alexa rank? Top 100,000? Top 10,000? Higher? I'd be interested to know - because I've always imagined it would work outside the top 100,000 or so anyway - and the data's probably a bit suspect down there anyway, due to sample size.
As a matter of interest - how high can you go with your manipulated Alexa rank? Top 100,000? Top 10,000? Higher? I'd be interested to know - because I've always imagined it would work outside the top 100,000 or so anyway - and the data's probably a bit suspect down there anyway, due to sample size.
By dint of simple visiting daily over a period of 3 months I have got a previous site down to mid 50k about 2 years ago. I haven't bothered with the ghostmouse approach because, well, I, too, can't be bothered. Plus I have a living to earn.
The thing is not actually "the doing of it" that amuses me. It is the theory of doing it. Maybe you remember the days of "alladvantage dot com where you leased screen real estate to it in return for a fee for surfing and sometimes clicking its adverts? Ghostmouse pretty much bankrupted them. People left it running and went to work.
Now I see where you are coming from. You are, I think, ignoring "absolute ranking" and simply using the rank as a random number for comparison purposes. Probably you have hit on the only valid use of their "tool"
Plus, add the exponential growth of number of websites... The need of processing power and storage capacity will also exponentially increase and Alexa will either be shut down or keep showing totally irrelevant results.
So, irrelevancy will inevitably increase. Useless.
Without the toolbar installed, all these people aren't getting correctly accounted for. It would be great if Alexa could tap some of the ISP traffic for more accurate wholesale business numbers. I love their layout, info, etc. but just wish that they could hit this segment a little bit more accurately.
While I'm posting - here's another great use for Alexa:
Them: I've got a great site, does 5m page views a month, makes a fortune - do you want to buy it?
Us: Let's look at your Alexa stats - how come you're outside the top million sites if you have the traffic you claim?
Them: Errr...
Great timesaver to weed out the complete BS before even getting into due diligence...
I am now at 1.5 million and it says I am heading towards 550,000.
