Writing this article I’m not thinking about seasoned SEO
experts who may find it shallow or naïve – it is written for beginner bloggers
or web-site owners who get puzzled by internet ranking system, and in
particular, by Alexa traffic rank.
Not trying to cover whole topic of internet ranking, I need
to mention that despite huge number of resources that report value, traffic and
other statistical characteristics of any selected web site, most of them pull
out their information from fingercount of sources, alexa.com being one of them.
Among multiple more detailed site stats, alexa.com maintains
one most important value, called “traffic rank”. In a nutshell, Alexa rank is
an inversion of relative number of visitors to the site – site with most
visitors is ranked #1, next most popular
site - #2 etc., with web sites that are barely visited getting ranks 10,000,000
and more. Intended usage of this rank is
dual – for site owners and administrators it supposed to help in measuring how
changes to the site impact popularity, while for potential advertisers and
alike traffic rank meant to assess relative value of placing an ad at the
particular site.
I personally bumped into alexa.com about a year ago, first as
an internet user, trying to raise my own awareness of popularity web resources
I’m using. For this purpose, I have installed a simple toolbar that shows Alexa
rank directly in the web browser window – like this:
At that time I was actively building my own digital photography web site, and got confused by drastically different results reported by Google analytics and Alexa.com. I have compared my Alexa rank (which was about 3,000,000 at that point) with few other hobby photography sites and found them to be in the same range, so I (incorrectly) assumed that Alexa stats are irrelevant for low traffic sites and finally lost interest and uninstalled the toolbar.
Few months later I decided to do a major rearrangement of my
hobby site and set a separate subdomain for the personal blog. As usual, during the setup I’ve got few
invitations to post advertisements on the new blog or monetize it in other ways
– one of the offers was to post reviews on my blog that would “get paid if my
Alexa traffic rank is greater than…”. Even though I was not really interested
in any of such offers, I checked Alexa rank of my site and found it pretty deep
in 10,000,000 zone – much worse than it was few month ago.
This was surprising, because while I was paying some
attention to this rank it was slowly climbing, and other analytics kept showing
small but steady traffic. Once intrigued, I tried to google the reason and
found quite few sources (i.e. http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-can-i-improve-my-alexa-ranking.html)
that explained some mechanics of Alexa ranking.
Obviously, no web resource can track visits to arbitrary
other site by the virtue of monitoring all of internet traffic – not only it is
unreasonably costly, it is also requires intercepting and decoding internet
packets to obtain necessary information, which is arguably legal.
Analytical tools like Google analytics or StatCounter gather traffic information by
asking webmaster to put specific HTML- or JavaScript code on the tracked site –
when site is visited, piece of the code embedded into the web page “calls home”
and records information about fact and the source of the visit.
Alexa.com, however, does not use this method. Or, more
accurate, it lets owner of the web site to opt-in into similar, code-based
tracking feature. There is a caveat, though: unlike many other options, code to
track analytics accurately is provided by Alexa.com only to paid customers.
At this point you may ask “if web master opted not to pay
Alexa for tracking, how his/her site can be tracked at all?” Well, there is an
answer to that – remember the “Alexa rank toolbar” I mentioned earlier? If
computer visiting a web resource has Alexa toolbar installed, toolbar itself
will “call home” and record the fact of the visit into Alexa database, even
though website itself has nothing to do with it.
In summary, Alexa traffic rank is populated by two totally
different sources of data – it may come from all visits counted on web-sites
participating in paid certification program, or it may come from tiny fraction
of visits counted because visitor of the resource have Alexa toolbar installed.
As a result, “paid” sites have significantly better rank – just because they
pay for all traffic being counted.
The same google search I have quoted above, mentioned third
way to get all visits to your site counted – by adding “Alexa widget” directly
to your site. “Alexa widget” is provided for free, for example, at www.blogger.com, but that tiny piece of code
can be easily copy/pasted into any web page. What this widget does, it shows
Alexa rank of the site directly in the body of web page – like this:
Because in order to fetch the rank web page now needs to visit alexa.com, it automatically makes the visit counted by Alexa traffic analyzer, making rank go up – to more accurate reflection of the traffic for the site that has widget installed.
Few articles I have looked at were agree in explanation of
mechanics and it stating that placing Alexa widget on the site should improve
the rank by making Alexa to count more accurate stats – but none of them were
any specific in how much increase one can expect for this small widget.
Partially for the sake of experiment, but also preferring my
site stats that are counted anyways to be accurate, I have installed both Alexa
toolbar in my browser and Alexa widget on my site. After gathering statistics
for few months I have figured how much traffic was missing, and results are
pretty impressive:
Chart shows trend of Alexa rank for my hobby photography site as well as couple
of similar in nature web sites.
Note few remarkable point on the aqua-colored line
representing traffic of my site. In July I have removed Alexa toolbar, and –
presumably I was the only one regular visitor to my site with the toolbar
installed – rank went down to miserable in couple of weeks. I have reinstalled
toolbar in September, and rank slowly started showing signs of life – pretty
small signs, given it was likely counting only my own visits. In October, I
have installed Alexa widget, and rank started steadily improving (remember,
smaller rank means more traffic). As of right now, Alexa traffic rank for my
site is around 460,000, while similar sites keep fluctuating in 2,000,000 –
5,000,000 range.
It worth mentioning that this #460,000 Alexa rank is
measured based on ~50 actual average daily visitors (based on google analytics
and StatCounter reports).
It is also interesting to compare this rank to ranks of some
other sites with more or less predictable popularity. So, taking my personal
amateur photography site with ~50 daily visitors and Alexa rank #463,652 -
boosted by Alexa widget – as one reference point, let’s look at two other web
resources.
One of them, actually shown on the graph above, is www.jkost.com – one of the best collections of
tutorials and learning resources about digital photography, Adobe Photoshop and
Adobe Lightroom, heavily referenced from social networks, www.adobe.com and undoubtfully frequented by
professionals and amateurs of digital imaging – has Alexa rank floating
(slightly up and down) at #653,481 – much weaker than my barely visited hobby
site.
Other example official site
of national dance council of America – internet home of organization
accounting 20,000 professionals and much more amateur dancers – has even
worse rank or #1,022,066.
Bottom lines:
- Alexa rank, while claims to be fact based, cannot be trusted as an objective absolute measurement of website popularity, because the ranking can be heavily affected by webmasters enrolling into premium tracking, installing Alexa widget or opting out from both.
- Alexa rank can be somewhat efficiently used for relative comparison of sites traffic if it is known (say, from presence of Alexa widget) that sites being compared have all traffic encountered by Alexa.
- If, despite obvious deficiencies of Alexa rank, you as a webmaster or blogger do care enough about improving this rank for your site, free and easy way to achieve this goal and improve Alexa rank is to install Alexa widget.
Originally posted at http://funtechnews.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/alexa-traffic-rank-demystified-2/
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