A friend of mine asked me “what’s alexa ranking? why some internet marketing and SEO companies mention it when they sell me their services?”

First, let me provide more information about Alexa and then I will talke about my experience about Alexa ranking.

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on the web traffic to other websites.

Alexa collects information from users who have installed an “Alexa Toolbar,” allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, as well as lists of related links. It uses these data to form Alexa ranking. There is some controversy over how representative Alexa’s user base is of typical Internet behavior. If Alexa’s user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet user population (e.g., a random sample of sufficient size), Alexa’s ranking should be quite accurate. In reality, not much is known about the sample and possible sampling biases. Alexa itself notes several examples (here and here) A known source of bias is the self-selecting, opt-in nature of Alexa traffic tracking software installation, but the significance of this bias on rankings is not reported.

From my experience, majority of normal internet users do not install Alexa toolbar. Only people with a website who cares about its’ alexa ranking, technology guys (may be they are developing toolbars and the like) downloaded and installed Alexa toolbar. So, data collected have seriously biased. Ask yourself, do you install Alexa toolbar? If you have, why?

In addition, if your site has not much traffic, you and your friends set your site as default homepage after installing Alexa toolbar. You can see your site get a boost in Alexa ranking. It is also reported that spammers have numerous ways to manipulate Alexa ranking.

In an experiment I did 3-4 years ago, a new website of mine can have a higher Alexa ranking (300,000 positions higher) than one of my old sites. When I look at my website traffic log file, the old sites’ traffic has much higher traffic than the new site (over 400%). After the experiment, I laughed. Alexa ranking is really a joke, and I never talk about it with my clients because knowledgeable clients will challenge me.

Since Alexa ranking is not accurate and easily to be manipulated, some internet marketing and SEO companies just manipulate the ranking, and then sell their clients how good they are.

To me, it is absurd.

First, Alexa ranking measures traffic ranking collected from Alexa toolbar users (also, the ranking provides a ranking, not the real traffic level, i.e. visitor numbers). what’s the relationship between Alexa ranking and search engine positions? High alexa ranking has no relationship with high google ranking, yahoo ranking, and etc..

Second, the most accurate source of website traffic is from log file. One should use log file analyzer or third party tracking systems such as Google Analytics, Sitemeter, and etc.. to collect website traffic information. If log file shows you an increase in traffic, you really get improvement. Why do I need to look at Alexa ranking?

To conclude, Alexa ranking is not trustworthy, and personally, I do not use it as a measurement indicator. If someone sells their service to you and talk how good they are with a reference to Alexa ranking, beware! You may be disappointed after using their services.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under SEO, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.