How does the Alexa ranking work?
Not many people know this, but if you would like to see how busy a web site is, you can go to http://www.alexa.com and see what it’s traffic ranking is. If you look at the information about a web site you can get an idea of the traffic the web site receives.
But how does it work? How does Alexa know what traffic another web site receives?
The short answer is; It does not work!………
A while ago I realised that two of my web sites had more or less the same Alexa Traffic Ranking. The only problem was that one received about 6,000 visits per month and the other just more than 40,000 visits per month. So how can their Alexa traffic ranking be the same, if the one received almost ten times more visitors than the other.
I asked around some of the webmaster forums and found some answers to my questions.
Apparently this is how it works:
Regular users of Alexa can install an Alexa toolbar in their browsers. http://www.alexa.com/toolbar
Alexa uses this toolbar to collect information about the web sites you visit if you have their toolbar installed.
In fact the Alexa traffic ranking is not an indication of the traffic a web site receives. It is an indication of the number of visitors, who have the Alexa toolbar installed, which visits a web site. You can have 50,000 visits per month but if none of your visitors has an Alexa toolbar installed your traffic ranking will be very low.
Thus it seems like the Alexa traffic ranking is an broad indication of the traffic a web site receives but not an accurate one.
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Thanks – Found this very helpful!
Great post. I also have two different sites with different sets of visitors and targets but same ranking.
Thank you Robert. I as web site owner use Google Analytics to view and compare my own stats. But from comments on various webmaster forums I found that some people tend to use the “Alexa Ranking” as a measurement of a web site’s ranking to determine if it is a high traffic site or not.
The two sites I referred to in my article is http://www.freeforex.net and http://www.hilux4×4.co.za . They target totally different groups and types of internet users. The Forex on is the one with lower traffic yet at some stage its Alexa ranking was the same as the Hilux one (both were at about 220,000). As you rightly pointed out this shows that more visitors with Alexa toolbars visited the Forex site than the Hilux one.
The difference between 6,000 and 45,000 visits per month is significant, yet to the (uninformed) outsider it seems as if they receive more or less the same traffic.
Good post,
Altho the Alexa stats is not completely useless. It is like any statistical data. It is just a snapshot and a projection of what it is or could be.
With any survey or statistical information, you can never query the entire pool. You take a reasonable random sample. The extrapolate that into something that might make sense.
Users who visit your site and who have the Alexa toolbar are probably similar to the random sampling.
With any statistical data you have to compare it with something else. Perhaps another set of stats, or perhaps history trending, or what ever, to see if your sample is correct or not.
There are many reasons why your two websites do not exhibit the same
stats.
Alexa is off
Your other stats are off
Your niche draws more Alexa users than the other blog
It is most likely that Technical blogs will be visited by technical people who have a very high possibility of having the Alexa toolbar installed.
Having said all that, any set of stats can be manipulates, check out my post on SEO stats. http://www.integralwebsolutions.co.za/Blog/EntryId/195/Should-you-believe-your-SEO-stats.aspx
But I would compare stats with the likes of Google Analytic, Quantcast, etc