Alexa Ranks – How Worthy They Are?

As an Internet Marketing Consultant, I have come across many clients who are very much concerned about the Alexa ranking of their as well as their competitors’ websites. As a professional Search Marketer, this is my personal opinion that Alexa ranking hardly matters when the success of internet marketing plan for any website is measured.

What is Alexa and Alexa Rank?

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Alexa is a website that provides information on traffic levels for any website and the Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

The schema of Alexa ranking is based on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

This traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical data that is gathered from millions of Alexa Toolbar users. This ranking is a combined measure of page views and visitors and is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time. A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic. Alexa simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on and does not mean that much by itself.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

The main problem with Alexa ranking is that it is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster or web savvy audiences because of the fact that they are much more likely to have installed the Alexa toolbar than the websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa. This makes Alexa a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential.

But unfortunately, Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks while measuring the value of advertising on any website and is considered as a central element in site monetization strategies.

However, if you really want to increase your Alexa rank, watch this space for the next post where I shall explain the methods to get started with Alexa and give you some handy tips and strategies that can be used to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.