How Accurate is Alexa Rank?
- Posted by Badi Jones on February 28th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »
Just quickly for those who didn’t already know, Alexa tracks the daily web surfing of all Alexa Toolbar users (there are millions of Alexa Toolbar Users), and from the collected stats, they rank and estimate the popularity of the top sites on the internet.
Let’s take a look at an example. How about this site? (seologs.com)
According to Alexa, as of right now, out of all the sites on the web, seologs.com is the 7,306th most popular site. That’s pretty impressive if I do say so myself, but (that’s right, there’s a but, and it’s a really huge one), unfortunately, it’s no where near accurate. Not even close. The reason being is that users who visit this site (those interested in SEO and SEM) are much more likely to have the Alexa tracker installed on their browsers. (Alexa tracking can be installed in Firefox extensions as well as other toolbars).
So just how inflated is that ranking of 7,306 for seologs.com? Well, another site I have access to, but is nowhere close to the topic of SEO (can’t name specifically), has an Alexa rank of about 15,000. That’s a lot lower than seologs right? Well that site gets an average of about 45,000 unique visitors per day (that’s right, per day), so you would expect that seologs.com would get at least that many daily visits right? I wish. Seologs.com gets an average of 1,700 unique visitors per day.
So does this mean that Alexa rank is completely useless? Not really. In fact it can be extremely useful, but (*** another big but) in my experience, only if the 3 month average rank is 100,000 or higher. Anything below that is just too easy to fake with just one person.
I can’t compare the Alexa rank of seologs.com to that of any non-seo.com site, but I can compare it to very similar sites, like SEOmoz.org, webmasterworld.com, and any other SEO related sites, and get a pretty good idea of how this site’s traffic compares.
chart generated with seologs Alexa rank comparison tool
So, if you want to know how your traffic compares to the traffic of your competitors, the Alexa rank is as close as you’re gonna get.
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7 Responses to “How Accurate is Alexa Rank?”
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March 6th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
This is quite interesting. I never knew that a website is having 15,000 Alexa and getting 45,000 Unique visitors! So as you can see my website http://www.funwadi.com is having 25,900 and having daily unique visitors of 700-1000 only and yet still we have good Alexa Traffic Rank. So how to get more better alexa rank? By installing the Alexa Toolbar in every PC who are accessing my website or is there any other way ?
March 6th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
>>is there any other way ?
Try pressing the reload button many many times.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Hi B Jones,
That’s not the way to increase the Alexa rank. I am talking about something real and I will give you better idea other than reloading the page many times. You can get Alexa Booster which will boost your alexa rank in real by clicking itself again and again.
So, here next time please try to give some genuine answers.
GoodLuck and GoodBye
March 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
AbdulBasit, I thought you were kidding. What I said was a joke. Why would you want to waste time trying to inflate your alexa rank? No one takes it seriously.
>> So, here next time please try to give some genuine answers.
I really hope that this is some sort of a bad translation, because it seems like you are getting bent out of shape over this.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
I am sorry. I thought you were serious. Anyways, I am not wasting time on making Alexa Rank good. It is getting good automatically when we get traffic and I was much interested on making it better rank.
Well, as you can see Yahoo, MSN, Google are having 1,2,3 Alexa Rank respectively so why they need to be on top. I know, not because to have Alexa Rank but to have top in everything. Anyways, I am not able to make you understand properly due to my poor english.
March 26th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Hi all
i want to know that is there any site that update us about the updation of the google. if you have then plz share with us.
September 20th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I understand that alexa may not be that exact or may not even be taken serious. But all I can tell you is that I rather have a low alexa than a high, and when it does increase it bothers me.
I think is a great tool but not in any way an absolute.