Forum Moderators: phranque
Why would anyone care about Alexa ranking?
It is totally meaningless.
Needless to say, you will rarely find any normal internet user having Alexa toolbar installed....so relax and try improving your real traffic and NOT alexa traffic rank
If you really think Alexa ranking matters, then just install their toobar and spam reload your site ...
I don't care for my ranking in Alexa but the info I freely receive about my sites and related ones. I spend more than a thousand a month in measurement tools for my main site and Alexa gives a lot of free useful info. I know perfectly what I'm talking about.
As I said, not everyone is smart enough to understand it.
There's no need to claim people who realize Alexa is absolutely bogus for anything lower than that aren't smart enough to understand it.
If you are trying to claim Alexa is the slightest bit legitimate for anything other than the very top sites (and there are still quite a few sites in that range through bogus methods), your insults of others intelligence are a bit ironic.
Sherly said: My alexa ranking going down.... Do any one have any idea for the same?
The Alexa numbers are dubious, and there are many causes for skepticism, some of which have already been outlined. In addition, your short-term (daily and weekly) numbers could be affected by your site having been down the day they measured ("Yesterday" is whatever date is indicated in the lower right-hand corner of the graph) or if the Alexa bot happens to visit during your "slow" time.
For example, my site provides educational materials for high-school and college students. Their end-of-week homework isn't due until Monday, so my traffic heads to the basement on Friday, and doesn't rise again until Sunday evening. If the Alexa bot comes by on, say, a Saturday afternoon, my "Rank" for "Yesterday" might be "N/A", even though my "Rank" for "1 wk. Ave." might be around 50K.
Habtom said: what is Alexa?
dailypress said: I would try Compete.com for better results!
stapel: compete.com shows mostly US traffic.
I noticed Alexa works better for a couple of my websites , on the other hand compete.com gives much better results on 2 other sites.
So it all depends. In my opinion, you can’t really rely on any 100%… but you can learn stuff from it… similar to Page Rank Toolbar which some people here are totally against.
None of these stats are 100% accurate.
For example:
Adbrite.com Unique visitors was no where close to what Google Analytics says in regards to my traffic but you can still use that information to get a rough estimate of how it compares with other sites who advertise with Adbrite. Assuming Adbrite estimates 60% of my real traffic, I would say it estimates the same for most other sites.
Just my personal thought!
It's just another example of how flawed any single one of these ranking systems are.
We've started using an aggregate of stats from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast to compare a set of sites in the same industry. Compete and Quantcast have at least a moderate level of correlation between each other for the sites we watch. Alexa is constantly an outlier when compared to other two and the server logs for the sites we control.
woop01 said: Stapel, the exact opposite is true for our sites....
For whatever it's worth, Quantcast appears to be posting numbers for my site that are 1/2 to 3/4 of the actual values, but at least the Quantcast patterns / trendlines seem to "track" realistically.
Thank you for the detailed information. I'm sure you've helped a lot of people with this! *smile*
Eliz.
oddsod said: There's tons of usefulness in Alexa.
Wlauzon said: Name one thing.
2) It can be a real ego boost when your Alexa trend-line overtakes a competitor's.
There: I named two things. *wink*
oddsod said: And that's even outside of the top 5000!
I could be wrong, of course....
Eliz.
Alexa helps in understanding site growth and trends .... it even helps in selling a site .... the higher the ranking, the more the people willing to buy .... lots of more things to consider....
Hope this helps a bit!
I simply installed the Alexa toolbar on an unused computer, and had a script tell it to hit one of our sites about every 45 seconds. Did that for about 3 days.
We went from around #230,000 up to 7,000'ish in that time.
Since then of course, Alexa spamming has gotten even much more prevalent - a search for programs that will automatically spam Alexa with hits for your site show hundreds of different ones available.
As far as 'showing trends' - I don't believe that. At least it is not showing any trends that you cannot find in hundreds of other places. When one of the Bimbo Triad get arrested or goes into rehab again, you will see a trend up for Britney et al sites. But you will see that everywhere, not just on Alexa.
While you can occasionally find some interesting data on Alexa, very little of it is actually 'useful' data that you can do much with.
[edited by: Wlauzon at 2:48 am (utc) on Aug. 24, 2007]
About 18 months ago I set out to prove to a non-believer in our company that Alexa rank is worthless
You proved that the alexa system can be deliberately gamed, not that is worthless to those who know it can be gamed and take that into account. I hope your co-worker was smart enough to take you to task for this.
This type of gaming is thought to be common amongst sellers of sites of dubious value to the unwary.
However, the value of alexa, as in all stats is in the observation of trends not absolutes.
Someone who values the information will not game the system deliberately, or at least take it into account.
Why trends? Well that's the nature of statistics, especially on the web. You can *never* capture every page view or every instance of a visitor characteristic, so you use the trend to make educated guesstimates. Any tracking vendor who claims otherwise, I would be very quick to brand as either stupid or a liar.
For example, to claim that exactly 98.7 percent of visitors have javascript enabled is a suspect statement. However, I would accept that "about 95 percent of visitors this month have javascript enabled as compared to 85 percent in the same month last year, so javascript usage is up for visitors to this type of site audience", I would accept. It may be a subtle distinction, but for a careful listener, like a client considering incorporating javascript into their base functionality on a site, it is an important distinction.
With this in mind, it is possible to make a cautious, limited interpretation of Alexa rank.
Order of magnitude is more reliable than exact order. The fact that Google, Yahoo and MSN are the top three demonstrates that at least at the top, it's in the ballpark. Despite the existence of Alexa spamming tools, note that nobody has successfully spammed their way to number 1. Therefore, manipulation has its limits: it's the reverse of the noise distribution, it gets harder as you go up in rank.
I'll even go out on a limb and say that the Alexa top 1000 mostly contains really big sites with lots of traffic. ;-)
Also, data for sites that have no vested interest in high rankings is probably more reliable (e.g., sites that are not for sale).