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Alexa Traffic Rank What It Is And Why You Should Care Or Not
lexa is an Amazon owned your website. Those sites with a
company that is famous for lot of content and targeted
its public traffic ranking visitors tend to generate a
service via its alexa.com larger number of page views. The
website. Website promotion guides overall Alexa rank is a
often make a big deal about how combination of the reach and page
to improve your Alexa ranking views numbers such that the
because a top position is often larger both of them are the lower
associated with high profits. As the site’s rank will be; for
a new webmaster, you must Alexa, a smaller rank indicates a
understand a few very important more important website. Alexa
points about Alexa’s service. reports these numbers for each
This article will explain what day, one week and three month
the data collected by Alexa mean averages and the overall change
and then describe why you should over a three month period. So,
care or not. how does Alexa gather these data?
There are three numbers that On a daily basis, Alexa collects
Alexa reports, reach, page views statistics about the number of
and overall rank. Reach refers to visitors and page views for every
the percentage of all web users website on the Internet.
that visited your site. Alexa Actually, it does not have data
reports this number as “reach per for all the sites. You see, data
million users.” For example if collection happens via web
Alexa reports a reach of one, it surfers that have downloaded and
means that on average out of one installed the Alexa toolbar for
million web surfers one visits their Internet Explorer browser.
your site. Page views simply When one of these users visits
measures the average number of and explores a site, the toolbar
pages a surfer examines when at sends this information to Alexa’s
servers. What this means for Safari, Opera or another
webmasters is that only those alternative browser. For example,
sites visited by users that have slashdot.org is a technology news
decided to install the toolbar site with an audience that is
will actually have data collected known to be very anti-Microsoft;
for them. In addition, since only Slashdot’s motto is “News for
a rather small subset of all nerds. Stuff that matters.” One
possible Web surfers actually expects that most of its users
uses the toolbar, the ranking is would use any browser other than
a statistical average that is not IE and in fact it was recently
necessarily a true indication of posted that an estimated 65% of
the quality and number of a Slashdot’s readers use a browser
site’s readers. In fact, the other than IE. As of this writing
number is really inaccurate for (July 12, 2006), Slashdot’s
sites with a small number of ranking was 176 with a reach of
visitors and Alexa admits that 5450 per million surfers.
this is true for those sites not Slashdot is known for something
in the top 100,000. called the “Slashdot effect” that
is when a story on the front page
To make matters worse, the links to a site, it receives so
toolbar is only available for many visitors that the servers
Internet Explorer. Of course, IE often are not able to handle the
is the browser used by the sudden increase in traffic. In
majority of Internet users with other words, I would expect that
data showing that it is used by Alexa’s rank is actually an
about 83% of them (onestat.com). underestimate of Slashdot’s true
This is not a problem unless your rank.
audience is more likely to be in
the other 17% of surfers, i.e., From a statistics point of view,
those that prefer to use Firefox, Alexa’s rank cannot be thought of
as an unbiased statistical software, for example Google
measure. The sample of people Analytics, rather than Alexa.
used by Alexa for collecting data However, many advertisers use
is not a randomly selected set Alexa’s ranking as a neutral
but rather it is biased towards third party estimate of a site’s
users of Microsoft Windows and popularity; they consult Alexa in
Internet Explorer as well as order to determine how much
those who are willing to install advertising space is worth on
the toolbar and submit to Alexa your site. This is the reason why
information about their browsing many webmasters display their
behavior. If your audience is Alexa rank on the front page. If
similar to Slashdot’s then don’t you happen to be on the upper end
expect accurate results. of Alexa’s ranking then you
Anticipate the same if your should be able to benefit from
audience includes people who are it; if you are not then you
pro-privacy and would never probably shouldn’t lose too much
install a toolbar that calls home sleep over it. Focus on adding
making their browsing behavior fresh content to your site; this
known to a large corporation. way you will be able to drive
more traffic to your site via the
So, if you really want accuracy major search engines and also
in terms of your site’s number of keep your visitors coming back.
users and page views then you are
better off using analytics
About the Author:
Peter E. is the creator of The Dollar Factory, a portal for webmasters with articles, news items, website spotlight and forum. If you are a new or old webmaster, join our growing community at http://www.TheDollarFactory.com
Read more articles by: Peter Elmer
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