Alexa Rankings Become Increasingly Innacurate
On Thursdays I usually discuss Google and ways to get your website ranked at the top of the search engine.
Today I wanted to change course a little bit and talk about Alexa. If you’re not familiar with the company, they’ve created a ranking system to help display how popular websites are in relation to each other. For example, YoungEntrepreneur.com is ranked 60,657 as of publishing time. This means that out of all the websites in the world, YoungEntrepreneur.com is the 60,657th most popular. A webmaster’s goal is to get a low a number as possible because it shows the popularity of your site.
Please note that Alexa rankings have nothing to do with your search engine optimization but they do help increase your reputation online and help you qualify for a number of different programs which can help you monetize your website more effectively.
In June of 2007, Alexa was one of my 3 Free Web Tools I Can’t Live Without. At that time, YoungEntrepreneur.com was ranked #20,964. In April 2007, YoungEntrepreneur.com’s Alexa ranking was an amazing 15,430! Despite increased forum participation and growth in the blog, the site has fallen in Alexa. This is not an unfamiliar story with many other websites.
Now you might think, sure YoungEntrepreneur.com is growing but maybe other websites are growing more quickly and deserve to rank higher. Well according to Compete.com, an Alexa competitor which also tries to rank the multitude of websites online, YoungEntrepreneur.com has bettered its ranking position by almost 30,000 places in the past year!
What’s going on with Alexa?
A quick look to their toolbar download page reveals an interesting story. Alexa gets most of it’s ranking data from people who download and install their toolbar. If you go to their toolbar page, however, from a Vista operating system you get the following notice:
“The toolbar currently does not work with Windows Vista. We are working on a fix and hope to release it soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!”
As more and more people move to Vista, they are not able to install the toolbar and Alexa has less data to work with thereby rendering their results less accurate.
Alexa’s position is unacceptable in my view if they hope to maintain their reputation as a reliable source of information. Windows Vista was released two years ago in November of 2006. “We hope to release it soon” is not good enough Alexa!
What’s your take on this? Am I making too big a deal of it or am I justified in my anger?
Evan CarmichaelYoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager
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4 Comments so far
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I don’t think Alexa was ever particularly accurate. Mainly because it’s sample size is relatively small and heavily biased towards techies.
Most techies don’t like Alexa for that reason. They rely too much on their toolbar. I think it is helpful for trend analysis and also to check backlinks but not much else.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Alexa Rankings Become Increasingly Innacurate
On Thursdays I usually discuss Google and ways to get your website ranked at the top of the search engine.
Today I wanted to change course a little bit and talk about Alexa. If you’re not familiar with the company, they’ve created a ranking system…
Good post! I think it is unacceptable that Alexa has gone so long without updating its toolbar so that it’s compatible with Internet Explorer & Windows Vista. You might not know though that Alexa does have a toolbar for Firefox, which I use, called Sparky.
Chris H.