Question about Alexa Ranking

I looked at sites on alexa and I notice the following:



But what exactly does the green pointer and the number next to it mean?

I mean of course it has to say 'It went up that much'.... but since when? On how much time is it based?

 

3 months
if you look at the alexa page for your site, click all links alexa offers for your site - then you see that it is

"3 mos. Change"

alexa has lots of FAQ and other pages with details published on their site

 

Thank you hans, your info was super helpful.

 

But don't take those charts serious....

Alexa is displaying results based on their spyware

 

It's not spyware, it's a toolbar which displays how much a site is ranking and tells Alexa how many times that site got hit by users using their toolbar (P.S. I got top 100,000 in a few days and I'm loving it )

 

alexa toolbar is installed by its users and activated / used by alexa with full consent of each user
hence it is NO spyware at all. thse who want to contribute to more accurate statistical data - such as myself - and have nothing to hide, have the toolbar installed and active -
all others have no alexa toolbar and nothing to worry at all.

 

I agree it is not spyware, but I wouldn't call it meaningful statistics either. If the alexa toolbar was equally distributed among Internet users, then yes, but it is much more likely used by webmasters, internet marketers, and bloggers.

Guess who gets big Alexa rankings? webmasters, internet marketers, and bloggers...

Best,
Rodger

 

so.. alexa ranking is not relevant...

 

alexa ranking is similar to a poll or public survey
statisticians can ask 1% of the population and derive from that number a fairly accurate guess to the behavior of the remaining 99%
alexa knows that - that's why on one of their pages they write precisely that their ranking starts to get more accurate if your ranking gets better than 100'000
the higher the more different users contribute to your ranking and the more accurate it gets - ALWAYS considering the small number / % of actual alexa toolbar users.

when elections are up - all the poosl abnout public oppinion and the popularity of candidates also are never made qeuestioning day after day ALL citizencs but a few thousands or a few ten thousands and yet the numbers published ( for example US presidential elections ) are quiet accurate and they asre accurate enough as a basis to WORK on if ALL parties involved alwys keep in mind the number / % of participants.

 

I like checking out Alexa stats for the fun of it, but I don't take it too seriously. Although getting your site listed on the "Movers & Shakers" list can send you a wave of traffic similar to getting a front page digg.

 

ALEXA SUCKS. Tell me, how much does it SUCK?

Well, to begin, it lists the contact info for my site as someone else who hasn't been associated with this site for FIVE YEARS. I have no idea how to get this information changed. According to Alexa

"The site owners, addresses, and phone numbers shown in the Alexa service are aggregated directly from InterNIC, Whois.net, Ripe.net, Apnic.net and other sites that are in the business of registering domain names. This domain registration information is publicly available to any Web user. E-mail addresses may be gathered from the actual web site, or from domain registration information."

Really? Well that person and phone number haven't been associated in any way or registrar for FIVE YEARS. I put in my request and it still hasn't changed.


Second, it lists my site as having positively lousy traffic, somewhere in the first 100,000 category. A site that I administrate that gets less traffic in ONE MONTH than I do in ONE DAY is listed as having an Alexa rating in the 70,000 range. That site has only been in existence for 5 months and had one month of traffic that was equal to mine and then it dropped like a stone. Now I have the facts. The Alexa ranking couldn't be more backwards.

Third, the link to Amazon to review my site links to something called "thelawclerk." What the heck? Reviews do not get posted on Amazon potentially for this reason. Writing to Amazon didn't help and apparently there is no way to correct any of this.

Fourth - the site traffic details could not be more bizarre. My site's visitors have gone up over the past several months. Alexa records my traffic as going down 12%. So which is the truth - Alexa or my logs?

Take it for what you want, but I have no idea what Alexa is tracking because a site that gets 110 - 125 unique visitors a day has cracked and remained in the under 100,000 category. Go figure.


Furthermore: They have no contact information for screw ups like the incorrect link to Amazon. Note that Amazon is currently getting roasted on a similar topic regarding allegations of privacy violations

 

your above comments show how little you KNOW about alexa

1. the site info is SITE-OWNERS responsibility
on alexa's site - your site at alexa - you will find a link to UPDATE or CORRECT YOUR data and place the according, as well as a link to request an update of the thumbnail if that is outdated.
as a well-educated professional site-owner you know that you have from alexa 2 files in your domain root:
- info.txt
- siteinfo.xml
to keep all alexa data current
before blaming alexa for having wrong data - make sure YOUR alexa related data are updated!!

2. alexa has feedback form online for any reporting of problems - just surf their site and they process such feedback and even rely to it a few days later !!

3. with a little bit of positive attitude you also get more positivge results in life!

you should care MORE about the quality and care of your sitre then all others take care about all the rest - as long as you complain about all the rest - and forget to update the site-owners homework no one takes care of anything

 

Alexa claims it updates information regularly from WHOIS, etc. My information has been current and properly entered for almost five years. This means that Alexa doesn't do what it says it does nor any other reasonable process to update information.

It takes over 2 weeks just to correct information that has been freely available from WHOIS?

What homework are you talking about? That in addition to content, forums, search engines, administration and other work I have to worry about the fact that Alexa can't just pull proper information from WHOIS?

Respectfully, your post says nothing about the lack of accuracy of the rankings. I've got a top 100,000 site for 3 months that isn't doing much of anything.

Additionally, there is no place to contact Alexa or Amazon about the linking problem. Amazon hasn't responded in over a week and there is no contact link I can find at Alexa.

 

if you would have read all the alexa pages LONG time ago thoroughly - then your info would be correct since long and you would have nothing to complain about.
if however yoiu care nothing about alexa - then you would have no reason to comment on alexa toolbar and just ignore it

if however you ignore alexa toolbar you can never expect your own site-visitors to do any different - and the less your site visitors care about alexa the less accurate your data at alexa get

if the number of site visitors is greater than about 5k unique visitors per day you usually get into the top 100'000 - depending largely on market or keyword / niche you are in - if all your sitevisitors read and know your own attitude then even that number of visitors may give no accurate data to start.

most of the thngs you complain about is just due to lack of your own reading all the alexa info available since MANY years on alexa site.

feedback - did you ever try to get a reply from google or yahoo ? I used the official alexa feedback forms i found when i needed one for any kind of problem and always got a reply to all - the delay - a week or so certainly is OK - G and Y and many other SE never reply at all.

any of your remaining problems around alexa - you may have to surf alexa site and even have a look at their forum or FAQ if they have one or else just directly communciate with alexa until all solved.
or
just ignore alexa if unimportant to you anyway and live with what you have now - ince you updated yoiur info.txt file all should be fine for you now. and since your site NOT ih your signature - may be you don't care that much about your site at all ... important things are published - unimportant things are kept secret and soon forgotten.

 

Once again, who is putting in the information into Alexa? It claims to automatically update and be relatively accurate and requiring little maintenance but this is not true. They are like Amazon with regard to contact IMHO.

Thanks for the comments. Unfortunately there are too many that use Alexa as a benchmark for something and I can't totally ignore it any more. It came to my attention this week since a site I'm dealing with shot up the rankings. I heard all about it. They have 100 uniques a day and have had a top 100K ranking for several months. Tell me more about the accuracy of this spyware!

The other issue is how many Alexa users fit into the demographic that some of our sites are in? What are the chances that an academic would use the spyware versus a teenage gamer? Better to use Hitwise, Neilsen and other metrics as a FAR more accurate measure of traffic.

 

Alexa means nothing

 

Alexa does have its uses - I'm trying to market my site to webmasters as well as users so the Alexa results are very interesting and useful to the webmasters.

I think once I've cracked the B2B side of the market (the webmasters) the end-users will come running!