Alexa
ranks your website, but is it accurate or are they just spying
on you?
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What is Alexa Ranking?
If you have never heard of Alexa ranking before you are not necessarily
in the minority. Alexa is a tool used primarily by techies
but is catching on quickly among the general population using
the internet. Alexa is a very powerful tool of viewing and
comparing web site traffic for one site to the rest of the
web. Basically, Alexa says this is the most visited site on
the Internet. But what is Alexa and how do they rank sites?
Alexa is a company owned by Amazon.com which
has as its main purpose to improve web navigation through participation
from
its users. Alexa does a lot more than simple rank web sites;
they also have data services and webmaster services designed
to improve the web. However, the focus of this article is Alexa’s
Ranking system.
First, to even view a ranking on a site you must
either go to www.alexa.com and type in the site you want information
about
or do what the majority of people do: install the Alexa toolbar
onto their browser. When you install the Alexa toolbar on your
browser any site you visit displays its Alexa ranking on the
toolbar. You can simply click on this ranking (a number) and
you will then be directed to Alexa’s website where you
can view more information about the website including reviews
posted by users and viewing a detailed traffic analysis for the
site. But, the most important aspect of installing the toolbar
is not that you can view the ranking of a site easy, but that
when you install the Alexa toolbar every site you visit is monitored
by Alexa and recorded. Now, Alexa is not keeping tabs on you,
but this is how they rank sites.
When you have the Alexa toolbar installed every
site you visit in a given day is given a vote for that day.
If you visit a site
multiple times during the day you visit is only counted once.
Alexa, however, doesn’t stop there; it watches how many
pages you view on that site and records that as well and will
continually count the number of pages you view throughout the
day (however viewing the same page over and over will only count
once). Alexa calls the counting of each visit “reach” and
the counting of page visits “page views.” Every day
Alexa takes these two figures, and the figures from the last
three months and calculates the traffic rank for each web site
by applying a geometric mean (i.e., math) calculation to them.
From these calculations Alexa ranks sites. The ranking is from
the number one site (ranking one) to as many sites as there are.
The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the
site.
What is interesting and advantageous in looking
at Alexa rankings is that Alexa rates a site for the traffic
which has visited
over a period of months. This gives a stable realistic view of
a site measure of traffic and how it ranks compared to other
sites. By using a three month period the Alexa rankings are less
subject to manipulation or by a one time spike in page views.
Now, it is not perfect. Alexa only calculates for websites in
their database because in order to get counted a site has to
be visited by someone with a toolbar installed. And everyone
doesn’t have a toolbar installed. So there may be a site
visited every day by thousands of people not in Alexa rankings.
But, it is probably very rare. Just looking at the top sites
you can see that the heavily used sites on the Internet are ranked
very low in Alexa. Here are some samples: amazon.com (rank 14);
weather.com (rank 64); cnn.com (rank 26); google.com (rank 5);
Yahoo.com (rank 1). These rankings are generally consistent with
the amount of traffic they have.
Now there is quite a bit more to Alexa and Alexa rankings but
this is enough to get you started. But, when someone mentions
they have an Alexa ranking of xyz or they say they are the most
visited site on the web you now know what is going on.
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