How Accurate is Alexa?
Over the past few weeks I have been keeping a close eye on my Alexa site ranking for both danielfelice.com and Nameseek. Both websites are constantly improving by big margins according to Alexa, however my hits are only steadily on the increase week to week.
At the moment my site rankings are 1,909,005 (98,257 in Australia) for danielfelice.com and 1,944,328 (15,804) for Nameseek. Last week both sites were over 2,000,000 in the site rankings, and outside the top 100,000 in Australia.
Even though hits have been increasing over the past few weeks, it seems hard to believe that both websites are ranked so good, even if it does bring a smile to my face. My hits just simply do not reflect that big of an increase.
Alexa site ranking is used by many webmasters to judge a websites performance, along with Google PageRank. Alot of domainers and webmasters who are trying to sell websites/domains are increasingly using Alexa site rankings to justify the price they are asking, and many potential buyers are using this a guide as to whether a domain or website is actually worth the asking price or not.
But how accurate are Alexa site rankings?
How Does Alexa Measure Traffic?
Alexa statistics are based on users who visit a particular website using the Alexa toolbar and other data collected from various sources. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview.
What is Traffic Rank?
Alexa’s explaination is as follows. The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on a value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.
So in short, Alexa bases your websites traffic rank on a small sample of the internet population over a three month period. I found a great quote on a webmaster forum that compares Alexa site rankings to television ratings.
Think of Alexa as a rating system much like TV. They are using a small sample of the population and showing you stats.
I still have not made up my mind as to whether I should trust the rankings or not, as the statistics are based on only a sample of internet users. However, it is widely accepted as a way of measuring a sites appeal, and Alexa and Google PageRank seem to go hand in hand for webmasters as together they determine a sites success.
For now, I’ll keep looking at my sites ranking and smiling as they continue to increase!
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