Is Alexa a Worthless Tool?

11 years ago

The more visitors a website has, the higher the alexa ranking. The bad part is that, alexa do not care whether the traffic is legit or not. One can buy traffic(thousands even millions) just to bump up alexa ranking.

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matheusgrafix

11 years ago

Originally Posted by networm

The more visitors a website has, the higher the alexa ranking. The bad part is that, alexa do not care whether the traffic is legit or not. One can buy traffic(thousands even millions) just to bump up alexa ranking.

It's not like that, visitors need to have alexa toolbar installed, or a cookie, or a plugin, or something related to alexa, in order to the rank get counted.
Just because Alexa is above 100 k, doesn't mean the traffic is bad.

Dear warriors,

I used to see my blog going up in Alexa until August this year when it ranked 79k. It's been almost four months and traffic has tripled but the rank has been consistently going down. I looked across some forums and found some weird solutions such as download Alexa toolbar and encourage your visitors to do the same. I mean what kind of metric is this?

At 1000k unique visitors per day it ranked 79k and now at 3000 visitors it is ranking at 195,000.

Don't make your business depend on it. Use Google Analytics too.

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Jeff Falzone

11 years ago

Alexa is important of course, but it isn't the ONLY or most important factor that comes in game! There are 100s of sites outta there who have low traffic but an higher alexa rank than most other sites only by having a paid traffic source.

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Mousumi

11 years ago

Let me clarify one more thing. My blog heavily depends on Google Organic traffic. This is something that hasn't changed for over a year. My question is why, even if the traffic is steadily increasing, is my Alexa ranking decreasing?

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TheProgrammer

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mousumi

Let me clarify one more thing. My blog heavily depends on Google Organic traffic. This is something that hasn't changed for over a year. My question is why, even if the traffic is steadily increasing, is my Alexa ranking decreasing?

I'd suggest you to do not waste your time on Alexa numbers, yes this is only "number" nothing more than that.
BUT If you wanna decrease it, then install alexa widget in your site.

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Amandasimmons

11 years ago

Forget Alexa and focus on your blog. Alexa is owned by Amazon and their rivalry with Google is an old story.

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paulgl 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Amandasimmons

Forget Alexa and focus on your blog. Alexa is owned by Amazon and their rivalry with Google is an old story.

Actually, they have no rivalry except friendly. They are business partners in
many things, from Kindle to blogger. They compete, but they are certainly
not enemies.

Google owns tons of websites just like amazon. Alexa.com being one
of them.

Zappos, owned by amazon, spends a ton of cash for ads on google search.

Paul
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James Andy

11 years ago

IMO, alexa ranking is not important you should concentrate on Google ranking which is important in SEO.

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It Is Me

11 years ago

Alexa don't calculate all the visitors.
They calculate just the alexa toolbar traffic.

May be your overall traffic increased and the alexa toolbar traffic decreased in the past some days.

One Unrelated Thing: Amazon Owned Alexa!

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kimseo 11 years ago

Originally Posted by syedakram1989

Alexa don't calculate all the visitors.
They calculate just the alexa toolbar traffic.

You are right!
That's why it very easy to manipulate Alexa ranking
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- aygabtu 11 years ago
  
  I look at it occassionally as a gauge, but it is far from accurate and is very dependent on whether your users and niche use it. One of my sites has about 1/2 the traffic of two of my others, but it ranks much higher because the niche it is in has more people that use the alexa toolbar.
  
  As others have said it is easily manipulated also, especially if you only have a few hundred to few thousand visitors per day.
  
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muzz

11 years ago

I think alexa ranking is important for a website.

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pratima 11 years ago

Originally Posted by muzz

I think alexa ranking is important for a website.

Hello,

Could you please Tell me how Alexa is Important For your Website.

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nihittuli1

11 years ago

Alexa has its own criteria of calculating rank. Its not only dependent on the visitors.

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paulgl 11 years ago

Alexa uses the toolbar only when it matters. Since
facebook visitors probably have no ridiculous alexa toolbar installed,
nor would I expect visitors to google, amazon, blogger, etc., to have it either,
the toolbar crap is just that. Crap. Sure, a few do. But out of the
millions of visitors a day to blogger, I'll bet those with any alexa
junk is less than 1%. If that.

Alexa uses a whole lot of traffic statistics, toolbar notwithstanding.

They want people to install the toolbar. It increases their own
web presence. They trick people all the time. You don't need
no stinkin' visitors with a toolbar to get an alexa ranking. Alexa
isn't that dumb.

Alexa ranking is totally meaningless. Anyone who tells you otherwise,
well, what else are they saying that you should also ignore?

Alexa is an amazon.com (YES THAT AMAZON) creation to funnel
traffic in their online empire. Like boxofficemojo, IMDB, etc.

Everybody should emulate amazon in that respect. Create your
own online empire and get people to value it!

What does amazon.com have to do with traffic statistics that matter?

Exactly.

Alexa is for entertainment purposes, nothing more, nothing less.

Paul
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rahmanpaidar

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mousumi

Dear warriors,
At 1000k unique visitors per day it ranked 79k and now at 3000 visitors it is ranking at 195,000.

Did you mean 1K? 1000k means 1 million unique visitors a day. That's so overhelming.

You can't forget totally alexa ranking but keep in mind that it's far from
being accurate.

Sure a website with alexa ranking of less than 1000 has more visitors
than a site with alexa ranking of 100,000 or more.

But you might not be able to say for sure which site has more visitors
with alexa ranking in the range of 100,000~150,000

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gotlinks

11 years ago

Easiest Answer Ever "YES".

Its completely and utterly useless for REAL seo that works.

Don't believe the liars that say it matters. It doesnt and true SEOS know this to be true.

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simplyben

11 years ago

This stat will tell you how meaningless Alexa is. Let's compare 2 of my sites:

Site A: Alexa Rank of 767,000
Site B: Alexa Rank of 1,220,000

Site A gets roughly 200 unique visitors a month
Site B gets well over 20,000 unique visitors a month

Alexa is pointless, spending even 10 seconds on it is a waste of time.

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TheContentAuthority

11 years ago

Mousumi,

I would suggest not putting too much weight on this metric. There is a lot of debate around the web as to how accurate and useful it is. Some people say that the data is totally exaggerated and skewed, others like to use it. As mentioned by other members, Alexa collects its data by a tool bar installed in the browser for users. If users don’t have the tool bar installed, they are not counted in the data. So in theory, if a website had visitors that were well aware of the Alexa tool bar and didn’t want it installed, that site would have a horrible Alexa ranking. That’s probably a horribly extreme example but you get the idea.

Alexa’s own website has this disclaimer on it, “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.”

They go on to say that “Alexa's data comes from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users…” As recently as this year it is estimated that there are nearly 2.1 billion global internet users. Even if Alexa’s data was gleaned from 10 million users, that’s only half a percent of total internet users; and not a representative sample.

Here is the page that contains the language above,

Help

In a nutshell, there are probably lots of other things you should be working hard on before you start worrying about this.

Check out this post from SEOMoz on the inaccuracies of Alexa and other measurement tools,

Testing the Accuracy of Visitor Data from Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick & Quantcast | SEOmoz

Hope that helps,

Shawn

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Mousumi

11 years ago

Thanks for your words and the links

I have forgotten Alexa for the better. I was a bit annoyed to see my blog dropping from under 100,000 to about 200,000

Rest is fine..Just yesterday my website crashed due to heavy traffic and I need to fix that first.

Originally Posted by TheContentAuthority

Mousumi,

I would suggest not putting too much weight on this metric. There is a lot of debate around the web as to how accurate and useful it is. Some people say that the data is totally exaggerated and skewed, others like to use it. As mentioned by other members, Alexa collects its data by a tool bar installed in the browser for users. If users don't have the tool bar installed, they are not counted in the data. So in theory, if a website had visitors that were well aware of the Alexa tool bar and didn't want it installed, that site would have a horrible Alexa ranking. That's probably a horribly extreme example but you get the idea.

Alexa's own website has this disclaimer on it, "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."

They go on to say that "Alexa's data comes from a large sample of several million Alexa Toolbar users..." As recently as this year it is estimated that there are nearly 2.1 billion global internet users. Even if Alexa's data was gleaned from 10 million users, that's only half a percent of total internet users; and not a representative sample.

Here is the page that contains the language above,

Help

In a nutshell, there are probably lots of other things you should be working hard on before you start worrying about this.

Check out this post from SEOMoz on the inaccuracies of Alexa and other measurement tools,

Testing the Accuracy of Visitor Data from Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick & Quantcast | SEOmoz

Hope that helps,

Shawn

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aaron786

11 years ago

Many people ignore Alexa, but most advertisers still consider it when evaluate ad buys on websites, so I think we need to raise the awareness about it, and encourage them to use other available tools to gauge traffic.

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MikeBailey

Banned 11 years ago

I think if you are tracking your keywords and use SEMrush then yes Alexa is pretty pointless. Thanks for telling me my website is #1223214234234 most visited website in the world, thats great now what?

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UMS

11 years ago

Not that I pay any attention to Alexa Rank, but I have to correct all those people that parrot that Alex Rank is ONLY calculated from users with the Alexa toolbar installed.

This is not correct.

Alexa state:

"Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources."

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Mousumi

11 years ago

Well said,
Even I have some bloggers as friends and they keep poking me showing their grave concern that my blog was diving in Alexa. I just show them the Analytics stats...what else can I do:rolleyes:

Originally Posted by UMS

Not that I pay any attention to Alexa Rank, but I have to correct all those people that parrot that Alex Rank is ONLY calculated from users with the Alexa toolbar installed.

This is not correct.

Alexa state:

"Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources."

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magestore

11 years ago

Alexa is still a trusted source. They collected information from installed tool-bars, there for we can partly believe the statistic they provide

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Jensha

11 years ago

Uhh... So does this mean that our site blogs can still survive and get decent traffic for our ppc campaigns even without alexa as long as we continue to pour it with decent quality content that people would most certainly search for?

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max4web

11 years ago

Still Alexa have its authentication but it does sharp fluctuation after working on top Alexa sites.

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mobiazmobi

11 years ago

I think alexa ranking is important for a website.

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bluesharksolution

11 years ago

Alexa is useful for the beginners who have just started the website to get into popularity. This does not consider the SEO factors.

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davidfrankk

11 years ago

This is probably the first case I've come across in which alexa has failed as a tool.
Pretty sure there are some other factors due to which your ranking has dropped even though the visits to your site have increased.
Possible factors:
- quality of traffic
- visit duration
- bounce rate
- location

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ChevyCam

11 years ago

Alexa rank is a joke anyways. One website can have 50k unique daily, but if only a few will have that toolbar, your rank will be bad and if another website gets only 500 unique daily, and if lots of these visitors comes with that toolbar installed on their browsers, that website rank will be good.

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impulse

11 years ago

Alexa has been extremely useful for helping me identify if a site is legitimate or not and whether or not it has authority. I have it installed on my toolbar. Works wonders.

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mycongme

11 years ago

I dont know what to say but i dont find it useful even in terms of SERP's and in terms of visitors or conversions..

Even the review stuff that comes under every website on alexa page, is worthless even to think about...

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HorseStall

11 years ago

Alexa is no longer really relevant to organic rankings.

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Is Alexa a Worthless Tool?

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