Today I have been doing a little bit of thinking about Alexa. In my opinion, Alexa ratings can not be held totally accurate or used as a definate basis for correct web statistics on a given website. First of all, have you heard about all the hype of moving your website to a Chinese based web host as a method of improving your rankings? It sounds foolish, but believe it or not I have seen hard evidence of this happening- on multiple occasions! I have not researched the topic enough to find out exactly why this is happening, but it is.

As far as any other methods you can implement to improve your Alexa ratings, you will notice that they all center around promoting Alexa.

For example, your Alexa rank will climb quickly if your website visitors have installed the Alexa toolbar. The more people who visit your site with the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, the higher you will rank. This is also the reason why “webmaster” based websites tend to rank much higher than, let’s say, a travel site- because statistics show that more of the visitors to a webmaster based website will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Based on this, website owners push for their visitors to install the Alexa toolbar so that when their visitors return to the site, their rank slowly increases.

There are webmaster-based websites with 50 unique visitors per day that rank much higher than websites of different subjects boasting 500 or 1,000 unique visitors per day- all because of the Alexa toolbar.

Now, let me draw your attention to the Alexa redirect. Alexa recommends using their redirect URL when linking to your site in order to increase its Alexa ranking. For example, using http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?sitefever.com would link to my site, http://sitefever.com after passing through Alexa and helping out my ranking.

Alexa has also distributed information which acknowledges that any site that ranks over 100,000 may not have very accurate statistics due to the small amount of visitors that the site most likely brings in- only I have seen websites with more than 1,000 unique visitors per day which rank over 1,000,000! In other words, it has been confirmed that the website statistics for sites with a 100,000 or less rating will be much more accurate than sites which rate higher than 100,000.

True, I believe that Alexa is a very fine resource to gather some preliminary information about a website, only I do not believe that Alexa should be used as the Bible of website statistics, as many people view it. If you are an advertiser looking for a website to team up with, try to look beyond Alexa when researching a websites value. Check backlinks in major search engines, Google PageRank, content quality and quantity, and number of RSS subscribers if applicable. If you make the mistake of judging a website’s value and popularity based only on Alexa rankings you can easily pass up sites of much greater value to you. Just be sure to do your research and not make any definite decisions based only on numbers from one source.

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Category: Internet Marketing
Article posted by: Neon on July 29th, 2007