Hello, I have a question regarding alexa page rank. I have designed websites for several years, mostly small businesses in order to provide a web presence so potential clients can basically read an online brochure about the company. Now I am building ecommerce sites for businesses and I am curious about how alexa works. Here is the deal, a site I am currently working on had an alexa ranking of about 380,000 in August, it went to approximately 350,00 in September. This entire time we did not market the site and I was basically the only one visiting it, testing it, so on and so forth. In October our traffic increased from approximately 10000 visits per month to approximately 32000 visits but our alexa ranking slowly dropped this entire time. I have no idea why. The statistics I used earlier are based on google analytics and I know they are accurate as I have checked the bandwidth usage reports provided by my hosting company. In addition to the traffic reports google analytics shows that my bounce rate is somewhat low, around 11 percent, but alexa shows that it is much higher, around 30 percent. What puzzles me is that when I was basically the only one going there without a unique IP our traffic was much higher on alexa, now that we are generating unique visitors the alexa ranking has gone down. Can anyone help explain this? Thanks for any input.
Alexa rank is USELESS and inaccurate. Traffic/revenue is what matters - you say your traffic is increasing - that's awesome - pay no attention whatsoever to your Alexa ranking and keep working on building traffic and income.
dlm, thanks for the reply. I do totally agree with you I that it is useless although I would still like to know what makes them behave like this. Thanks.
I'm sorry I have to only partially agree with you dLm, BlazinBilly. While Alexa traffic rank is not very in-depth and by itself is not very useful, it is still useful when you use it to compare large websites to each other. Just the rank may be of little use, but Alexa provides other interesting information such as pageviews per user and bounce rate. When you compare sites that have massive traffic you can gain interesting insights into what kind of website layouts contribute to particular bounce rate % numbers. The only thing about Alexa rank and charts is that it is an average, and sometimes it really malfunctions for some reason.
Not sure but alexa give result my acculturating data from the user using its tool. So more user with alexa tool use your site more will be the rank. You can try this out install alexa tool in your browser and see the result your site rank will improve,
I appreciate all of the input although I wasn't trying to judge alexa or compare it to anything. I am just curious why it goes the opposite way when my traffic increases four times what it was doing.
Because Alexa is stupid and inaccurate, I already told you that Don't waste your time worrying about that crappy website.
You're wrong. Most of the leads and CPA offers aim for US traffic and alexa is the most accurate tool for that. Keeping your alexa rank up is a good thing when you decide to build a large US based website and impress potential advertisers.
You're wrong. No credible advertiser uses Alexa. Alexa is pure crap. Easily manipulated, always inaccurate. I can get a site into the top 20,000 in a couple weeks and it will have 0 "real" visitors. Of course, I could probably sell that website to some idiot on this forum for $500 because of that Alexa ranking... But in the real world, people use traffic and revenue to valuate websites and advertising opportunities - not some imaginary rank by an untrustworthy website.
true, you can use a free software to get alexa rankings. I think compete is also the same thing. Analytics is the best. I wish they could be publically viewable
Why is your alexa rank going down? Because alexa is spyware and more people are using spyware removal tools to get rid of that pest program. Also, last time I heard, the alexa spyware toolbar does not work with chrome, opera and firefox. As more people use those browsers, alexa is being phased out.
Because it is an average, and because Alexa combines traffic information from various sources. Think about this... if one source gives you 1 visitor and another 100 visitors on that day, your average is 50 visitors. Add another source with only 1 visitor and you're down to 33 visitors. You are thinking about cumulative visits, and Alexa isn't cumulative, it's a bit chaotic, like the stock market charts.
Alexa is a good indicator of relative traffic rank for websites that are very popular. And well, gamed traffic and authentic traffic visually produces a different pattern.
Alexa rank should go down if you are for real. That is what Alexa does for me. When somebody tells me they are getting 100,000 hits a day or whatever and their Alexa is 20,123,645 then they are most likely pulling my leg. Not accurate, but enough to determine whether they have some traffic on the site.