Recently this week I have been tracking my alexa ranking and I have been recognizing a slight decrease in my rank and my traffic has been increasing alot. For people that don’t know what Alexa is, it is one of the largest Web crawls which processes massive amounts of data about traffic ranking and website information. So I decided to do some research on Alexa to find out the problem because one thing that any system has is a margin of error either more or less.
After researching this is what I found (this is from their website you can check here under some important disclaimers):
The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.
As you can see there is a margin of error in their system but this paragraph gives the reason I’m experiencing slight decreases in my alexa ranking (this is from their website you can check here under some important disclaimers).
Sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Alexa’s data comes from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users and other traffic data sources; however, the size of the Web and concentration of users on the most popular sites make it difficult to accurately determine the ranking of sites with fewer than 1,000 monthly visitors. Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable. Conversely, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes.
As you can see Alexa ranking are not reliable but its purpose is to guesstimate how popular a website is and how much it costs. I use Alexa to find up and coming websites, to track website trends and analyze data. I’m not discouraging people from using Alexa but to be mindful that everything is not 100% accurate. On a sidenote if you really wish to accurately track your stats of your website consult your website hosting providers for tools they provide. I personally use awstats.
Also here is a random fact I found from Alexa website that readers might find interesting.
Question
Why are there so many Chinese sites in the top 500?
Category: Traffic and Site Stats
Answer
Because Alexa’s traffic data reflects the usage of the entire global population of Internet users, large members of that global population, such as China, will be heavily represented in that data. Many Chinese sites do receive very large amounts of traffic, which is consistent with their inclusion in our top 500 list.
Popularity: 4% [?]
In the tough competition of the search engines, Google being the obvious leader, Alexa is trying every bit to pitch in by introducing more and more lucrative, advantageous and attracting features.
Why do you care? Alexa’s rankings are a meaningless number anyway… now meant only for entertainment value, has not accurate infos whatsoever so people don’t even bother about alexa ranking these days
Google Rank is much better
Let me tell you why I care:
First off even though it is not accurate with all websites, it becomes more dependable with websites in the top 100,000. Also it helps you gauge websites. For example if I see a website that wants my credit card information I’m more likely to choose a website with a higher alexa ranking to decrease the chances of me falling prey to identity theft. Even though Google Rank is good it is still not that dependable I have seen some horrible websites with good page ranks. I only pay attention to google page ranks if it is higher then the number 5.
You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really something which I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and very broad for me. I am looking forward for your next post.
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great stuff. Do you have an RSS feed? And will it be cool if I added your feed to a site of mine? I have a site which brings content through RSS feeds via a few websites and I’d like to include yours, most folks don’t mind considering I link back and everything but I like to get approval 1st. Anyway let me know if you can, thank you.
Sure you can, it seems as though my rss feed is mess up. I will start trying to repair it. Here is the link for now, http://compscistuff.com/feed/
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