Alexa doesn't know what the HELL it is doing...

by MouseandMice

Posted: 15 years ago 14 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Alexa Ranks are officially STUPID...

I recently soft launched my newest site (The Teenage Marketer's Secrets Revealed!) and I have tracking and testing software installed on it (KaizenTrack).

I am running a PPC campaign, have a signature on this board, and a few other things...

Kaizentrack says I am getting a few hundred visits to my index page a day, aweber shows a GREAT deal of those visitors signing up (ie, I know that my testing software isnt messing up and my PPC supplier isnt ripping me off)...

Yet, its affiliate rank is, at the time of writing this,

7,839,540

by contrast, I have another site that I consider a traffic failure... it is my worst one in that catagory: it gets no more than FIVE visitors a day...

its rank?

1,428,551

Alexa is highly flawed...

Either way, I would expect an IM niche website to have more visitors with alexa toolbars than a NON- IM related niche... right?

#alexa #hell

mfleisch 15 years ago

I think one of the issues with Alexa is that rank improves over time so if you have a new site, it may take Alexa a while to catch up. Additionally, I know that it measures the number of in-bound links as well. I'm assuming that it uses this in the calculation. So, if you have a new site, w/o a lot of back links, chances are the rank will not be what you're expecting.
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bgmacaw 15 years ago

Alexa is highly inaccurate. It only reports on traffic from visitors who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Guess which people are the primary ones who have it installed? You guessed it, Internet marketers. This means that you can have a lame 'make money online' blog that gets about 100 hits a day sitting at 150,000 or so and have a knitting blog that gets 1500 unique visitors a day that has an Alexa of 925,000.
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Traffic101 15 years ago

Yeah Alexa is strange. My PR2 website has a rank of 4 million and something and my PR1 blog has a rank of 2million. Obviously somethings up. What's a better wage to gage besides PR ranking?
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Pete Egeler

15 years ago

Anyone that's SERIOUS about their site should forget Alexa all together. It's (as mentioned above,) dependent upon those that have their toolbar installed.

The only thing that matters? Where do you rank on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, etc. The results are not dependent on having a special "toolbar".

In other words, "Real Marketers Don't Do Alexa".

Pete

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braver55b 15 years ago

Alexa is notoriously unreliable, I have had my site ranking in google for months and yet Alexa has yet to include my blog.
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- Charles E. White 15 years ago
  
  The only thing Alexa ranks is how many people uses its toolbar. Nothing else!
  
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  Kirk Ward 15 years ago
  
  I just recently dropped by to see an in-law of mine at a local university Small Business Development Center and got into a conversation with one of the counsellors who asked me what I did. When I replied that I tried to make a living off the internet, the counselor looked my site up on the internet and then after looking at the Alexa rankings went into a long explanation of how poorly my site was doing compared to hers.
  
  She also bragged about how much her site made each month. I dutifully sat there and acted amazed and very impressed that she was doing so much, while mentally calculating that my poorly ranked site was bringing in eleven times as much each month as her very successful site.
  
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MarQueteer

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Pete Egeler

Thanks, that's sums it up perfectly. It's in the same category like "High PR means good ranking" and "EDU links are worth more than links from other sites"...

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eniven 15 years ago

Alexa's unreliability is very very well known. As others have said, it only reports traffic from those who have its tool bar installed.
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- cliffmaster 15 years ago
  
  Owned by Amazon, partnered with Google and Microsoft. Should I say more ? If Sparky aint being used to visit your site, alexa aint a listening.
  
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Writing Pete 15 years ago

I've noticed these huge flaws myself with Alexa, yet I usually glance at it on my status bar (along with pagerank) whenever I visit a site. Just a weird habit I guess!
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netstrife 15 years ago

Generally the lower the alexa rank the more accurate it is, when it comes to the top 500 sites in the world alexa does it very well.. if your site only gets like a hundred visitors a day or whatever then it's pointless (and it's impossible to create a service right now that can ACCURATELY give traffic stats for sites with hardly any visitors). I still find compete.com to be better than alexa for smaller sites.
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seobro 15 years ago

I have the Alexa toolbar. Ratings increase when I visit your site.

BTW, got an email today that said 50%OFF, I go to the site and it says
"We're sorry, this promotion is no longer valid."

I know what it feels like to be angry, never fear, the Alexa toolbar is here!
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MouseandMice 15 years ago

Yeah... I always knew that it was horribly unreliable... but I never got HOW unreliable it was, you know?

Eye opener!
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