If you’ve started to take your blogging seriously and have met any other like minded bloggers, you’ll have no doubt heard of Alexa. It’s the web site ranking tool of choice for many people. Created by Amazon, it offers interesting statistics on millions of websites. PR companies often refer to Alexa to gauge whether to work with a particular website.
Ever since it’s inception, Alexa rankings and their accuracy have been hotly debated. Misleading, confusing and erratic, it’s hard to know if Alexa is really a useful tool for web site statistics. Here’s some issues we’ve found.
The Alexa toolbar
All the statistics created by Alexa come from the Alexa toolbar. This can be downloaded and installed on your web browser and tracks the websites you go to and the number of pages you view. Aside from the dubious use of this information, it’s important to note exactly who has the Alexa toolbar installed. If you’re a blogger or a web designer you’re highly likely to have downloaded it. If you’re into tech gadgets you may have too but if you are Aunt Mabel browsing the web for knitting patterns you’re not likely to. Neither is the “average web user” and of course there’s no toolbar integration for the millions of mobile web users too. Over 85 million people have it installed but that’s a fraction of the users online, especially when you consider Facebook has over 500 million users worldwide. The toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and most recently Google’s Chrome. There’s no support for Opera or Safari so many Apple Mac users are not included in the viewing statistics.
Confusing results
At Alexa.com you can search for almost any site in the world and you’ll find stats on it. Unfortunately these stats aren’t presented in a very meaningful way. While some of the data is of interest, if you search for your own site you’ll usually find a huge discrepancy between your actual stats and Alexa stats. If you compare two sites the results become even more confusing. You’ll often find a site you know is much more popular than another will have worse results on Alexa. This is often due to the demographic of people viewing the 2 sites. 1 with a higher probability of Alexa toolbar installed. You’ll also find that unless your site appears in the top 200,000 or so the results are fairly meaningless anyway. It’s worth taking an average over the past 6 months rather than looking at daily stats.
Alexa doesn’t like Web 2.0 sites
We all love sites that make browsing and logging in an easy experience. Lots of great web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and Flash have made it possible to log in, change settings and post tweets without ever needing to refresh the page we’re on. Unfortunately this is useless to Alexa which only counts page views. A site that has a log in form on it’s own page will get more page views than a site with a clever Web 2.0 approach. The same for a site that has one page and a flash movie to offer all the content. One page view means less hits for Alexa to count, so again the results are skewed by a lack of universal support.
Is Alexa useful?
The evidence would suggest that Alexa is an outdated and inaccurate tool for measuring a web site’s success and popularity. While this may be true I still believe Alexa has it’s uses. It’s best not to trust short term statistics as these will fluctuate, often wildly. Alexa also has a habit of updating it’s algorithms and reducing everyone’s scores as they strive to make them more accurate. If you’re looking for a general growth pattern and an overall average score for a web site then it still remains useful. Just be aware that it’s results may be inaccurate and skewed by a host of un-addressed issues.
How to improve your Alexa ranking
As with most tools on the internet that offer a scoring system, there are ways to manipulate them. Many people believe that simply installing the toolbar on your browser of choice and visiting your site will easily bump up your ranking. If your site is down in the low 2 millions, just installed the toolbar and visit your site every day. On many occasions it’s pushed a site in to the 100,000 area. You can also participate in webmaster forums where you can post links to your site. You’ll find a higher number of Alexa users there so your chances of a higher rank will increase.
Alexa should only ever be used as a guide, not as the last word in web statistics. It’s flaws not only create inaccurate results but make it fairly easy to be exploited. PR should take less not of it while many bloggers should be treating it as another SEO task and maximising their opportunity to rank high.
Ever since it’s inception, Alexa rankings and their accuracy have been hotly debated. Misleading, confusing and erratic, it’s hard to know if Alexa is really a useful tool for web site statistics. Here’s some issues we’ve found.
The Alexa toolbar
All the statistics created by Alexa come from the Alexa toolbar. This can be downloaded and installed on your web browser and tracks the websites you go to and the number of pages you view. Aside from the dubious use of this information, it’s important to note exactly who has the Alexa toolbar installed. If you’re a blogger or a web designer you’re highly likely to have downloaded it. If you’re into tech gadgets you may have too but if you are Aunt Mabel browsing the web for knitting patterns you’re not likely to. Neither is the “average web user” and of course there’s no toolbar integration for the millions of mobile web users too. Over 85 million people have it installed but that’s a fraction of the users online, especially when you consider Facebook has over 500 million users worldwide. The toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and most recently Google’s Chrome. There’s no support for Opera or Safari so many Apple Mac users are not included in the viewing statistics.
Confusing results
At Alexa.com you can search for almost any site in the world and you’ll find stats on it. Unfortunately these stats aren’t presented in a very meaningful way. While some of the data is of interest, if you search for your own site you’ll usually find a huge discrepancy between your actual stats and Alexa stats. If you compare two sites the results become even more confusing. You’ll often find a site you know is much more popular than another will have worse results on Alexa. This is often due to the demographic of people viewing the 2 sites. 1 with a higher probability of Alexa toolbar installed. You’ll also find that unless your site appears in the top 200,000 or so the results are fairly meaningless anyway. It’s worth taking an average over the past 6 months rather than looking at daily stats.
Alexa doesn’t like Web 2.0 sites
We all love sites that make browsing and logging in an easy experience. Lots of great web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and Flash have made it possible to log in, change settings and post tweets without ever needing to refresh the page we’re on. Unfortunately this is useless to Alexa which only counts page views. A site that has a log in form on it’s own page will get more page views than a site with a clever Web 2.0 approach. The same for a site that has one page and a flash movie to offer all the content. One page view means less hits for Alexa to count, so again the results are skewed by a lack of universal support.
Is Alexa useful?
The evidence would suggest that Alexa is an outdated and inaccurate tool for measuring a web site’s success and popularity. While this may be true I still believe Alexa has it’s uses. It’s best not to trust short term statistics as these will fluctuate, often wildly. Alexa also has a habit of updating it’s algorithms and reducing everyone’s scores as they strive to make them more accurate. If you’re looking for a general growth pattern and an overall average score for a web site then it still remains useful. Just be aware that it’s results may be inaccurate and skewed by a host of un-addressed issues.
How to improve your Alexa ranking
As with most tools on the internet that offer a scoring system, there are ways to manipulate them. Many people believe that simply installing the toolbar on your browser of choice and visiting your site will easily bump up your ranking. If your site is down in the low 2 millions, just installed the toolbar and visit your site every day. On many occasions it’s pushed a site in to the 100,000 area. You can also participate in webmaster forums where you can post links to your site. You’ll find a higher number of Alexa users there so your chances of a higher rank will increase.
Alexa should only ever be used as a guide, not as the last word in web statistics. It’s flaws not only create inaccurate results but make it fairly easy to be exploited. PR should take less not of it while many bloggers should be treating it as another SEO task and maximising their opportunity to rank high.
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