You Do Not Have to Be Popular To Be Alexa Popular
I have never really been concerned with Alexa rank. At best, the information it provides is a very general metric to how much traffic a site actually receives. The information it bases it’s stats on is compiled from the amount of visitors a site gets that actually have the Alexa toolbar software installed.The Alexa toolbar can also only be installed on the Internet Explorer browser. In this day and age, with so many (better) different web browsers being used, Alexa ranking value is somewhat diminished. So why should you care?
Today, getting accurate statistics on a website that you do not own can be very difficult. Many advertising networks now factor Alexa ranking into judging how valuable a site is. For example, Text Link Ads and ReviewMe both use Alexa Ranking to judge how much you get paid for linking to an advertiser. Many of the top CPM advertising networks also use Alexa data to determine if you are eligible to participate in their campaigns and join their network.
With the online advertising industry getting so competitive, if you are an advertiser, it appears in your best interest to have a higher Alexa rank. Some people also use Alexa Ranking as a selling point when selling their website.
Many, if not most of the online publishing industry will be in agreement that Alexa statistics are skewed at best. Sitepoint member KLB pointed out a while back that a simple script allowing you to artificially inflate your Alexa ranking. I tested this out and can confirm that run on one machine a day, this will increase your Alexa rank to well over 50k. This experiment was done on a site not made public by search engines or advertising. In fact, it was not even indexed in any.
This just goes to show how meaningless an Alexa ranking can really be. So next time you judge a sites popularity based on its Alexa ranking, make sure you can back it up by checking the amount of quality backlinks it has, along with it’s pagerank/sitescore and common sense on the quality of it’s content.
December 10th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
I think the script offered at sp might give a boost but I doubt it could get you into the top 500
December 10th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Oh, most certainly not. But it can most definitely get you into the top 50k. With so many par per post advertising networks, text link advertising networks and a confirmed TIER 1 CPM network placing so much emphasis on Alexa rank, it may seem like it would be in your best interest to give your site a little “boost”.
December 27th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Great post Dave. On our blog, I posted about how the Alexa ranking can be manipulated and it is unfortunate that so many still refer to it as an authority. There are even companies out there that will increase your ranking for a fee :|.
April 16th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Agree with you here. My impression is that many Alexa rankings are manipulated. Some of the web sites I have advertised with send little traffic although their Alexa ranking and invoices are impressive.
The ranking has never been accurate but earlier it gave you an idea of a sites traffic volume, and what to expect when you advertised. Well this is a few years ago,, now a days I hardly bother with the Alexa ranking at all. Usually I ask each site for traffic details. The serious ones provide the necessary details pretty fast, the reluctant ones I stay away from.
Tony
April 18th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Thanks for stopping by Tony.
Noone knows better how skewed alexa stats are than webmasters themselves. For example, I have a two sites. One gets TEN times more traffic daily than the other yet the one that has less traffic has the higher alexa rank.
This is because of the audience of the lower traffic site. Webmasters. Webmasters that have a higher ratio of the alexa toolbar installed.
April 18th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
I have noticed the same strange ranking issues. Just launched and started marketing a new site. Amazingly it’s ranked equally to a 5 year old and pretty well visited website of mine, while the new website hardly knows what a visitor is.
The Alexa rank hype seems to impress the market, regardless of that many questions its value. Guess there are some disappointed advertisers around.
Tony
PS. Nice place you have here, interesting blog.
April 18th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Exactly my point Tony. And thanks for stopping by again. Your first comment didnt get the link, but now you can have it :)
Thanks for the compliments.
I’ll be adding some stuff to your site shortly.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
I see posts like this from time to time, but I’d love to see the data to support them. Jason Calacanis said a few months ago that Alexa rankings we easily manipulated, said he was going to have his friends boost his rank, and then nothing happened. Either it didn’t work or he had no friends.
If the script actually works, could you just say what site you used it for so we can see what the effect was?
June 29th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Hi Denny, thanks for stopping by.
I remember when Jason mentioned that. I think he may have got too involved with Mahalo. Anyway, I know what you mean when you read a post with no direct supporting evidence. The point was not to prove the script worked. The script is just a quicker way to visit your site(s) each day.
If you visit your site every day with the alexa toolbar installed you will at LEAST get into the top 100k. It only takes ONE person. The higher you get though, this will be impossible.
Just set up a domain, your own private site and try it.
July 6th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
“The Alexa toolbar can also only be installed on the Internet Explorer browser.”
not entirely true. probably accurate when you wrote one of your many excelent articles.
Mozilla / Firefox has no problems with the Alexa statistics and site visitor feedback. There was a plugin available last year. You are correct as concerns “the toolbar” but i think your objection was the fact that Firefox users would not be included in visitor stats.
thanks for a truely outstanding blog.
greets from Sweden
July 7th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I tried the script you suggested. The effect of running it every day was to boost the site to a rank of 330k. Alexa claims I have a reach of 0.00015%, and that the average user does 8 pageturns per day. 0.00015% means one user in a million. This tells me their daily panel is ~1M users and I’m the one in a million visiting the site, and the 8 pageturns are the ones done by the script. If you want to see for yourself, check out mermaids-unlimited.com.
If you get a hundred friends all to to it, I suppose you’d get 100x the reach. But that’s no easier than getting 100 more people to visit your site every day.
Frankly I see no way that running this script is going to produce a meaningful boost in ranking. Certainly not to 50k. I’ve shown my data. Could you show yours? What was the site you used?
July 7th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Denny, the AdWords ads are for traffic to the blog. There are ads for all the articles in the blog. We do not sell links or advertising of any kind.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:05 am
I built a profile on a site called congoo.com and facebook.com and myspace.com and my alexa rank has gone up significantly since then. Omniture says that congoo.com is the 2nd best source for referrals other then google.
August 29th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
when i started to increase my alexa rank i used the redirect from alexa to my website, and installed the alexa toolbar and would flick through the my pages a few times so alexa know that the pages are there and my alexa increased but that was about 3 months ago and i left it since then and it shot back up again
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:12 am
The Alexa business is out of my understanding. Recently some of my friends have complained that they get a virus alert when using alexa on IE. They are not able to install it and it has screwed up their ranking.
Just out of curiosity, what does the group think about compete.com ?
January 12th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
the alexa redirect no longer works so do you have any other suggestions?