Alexa Rank – What Is It? And Is It Important?
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People love sticking numbers on things — usually when comparing and contrasting them with things that are similar — and websites are no exception. After all, what webmaster wouldn’t want to compare and contrast his or her website with that of a competitor?
One of the most well-known metrics aimed at allowing people to do exactly this is the infamous Alexa Rank.
Why infamous?
Well, many people don’t trust it as an accurate indicator of what it’s supposed to be a measure of.
Namely, ‘How a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past three months,’ (quoted directly from Alexa’s official website). This is itself a bit of a dubious definition. I mean, ‘How a website is doing…’ What does that mean?
Right, enough of an intro, let’s get stuck in.
A Little History
Founded in 1996, Alexa is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com (acquired by Amazon in 1999) that specializes in providing commercial web traffic data gathered via various toolbars and web browser extensions.
Some of Alexa’s most notable previous activities include providing a database that served as the basis for the creation of the Wayback Machine and the creation of various search facilities (now largely discontinued).
The feature it’s probably best known for is, of course, ‘Alexa Rank’ — a metric that ranks websites in order of popularity, or, rather, how well they’ve been doing over the previous three months.
Note: For more on the history of Alexa Rank, check out this earlier post of ours.
How Is an Alexa Rank Measured?
According to the official Alexa website’s Our Data page, the rank is calculated using a ‘combination’ of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past three months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked as #1.
The data is collected from a subset of internet users using one of 25,000 browser extensions for either Google Chrome, Firefox and/or Internet Explorer. An algorithm then ‘corrects’ for various potential biases and attempts to compensate for visitors who may not be in Alexa’s measurement panel (a factor it hasn’t always tried to accommodate for) and normalizes the data based on the geographical location of visitors.
Alexa refers to the data retrieved from browsers as its ‘Global Traffic Panel‘, pulling data from millions of internet users in this way. However, Alexa also sources data directly from third parties to improve the accuracy of the tracking.
It should also be noted that Alexa doesn’t provide separate rankings for sub-domains and sub-pages. It does make an exception to this rule for large blog networks, such as WordPress.com.
How Can I View a Website’s Alexa Rank?
At least this part is straightforward: Simply go to the official Alexa website, type in your full domain name and hit return!
Alexa refers to this report as ‘Website Traffic Analysis’.
The report displays interesting metrics such as bounce rate, daily pageviews per visitor, daily time on site and the percentage of visits from search. It also highlights various demographics, a list of sites that link and even page speed/load times (all of which should probably be taken with a pinch of salt).
You can also view the Alexa Rank of any website you’re visiting by installing the Alexa Toolbar on your browser.
In addition to the global Alexa Rank, it also highlights the USA Alexa Rank for the website, the number of websites linking in, the time it takes to load the page, similar websites, and links to the full report and the Wayback Machine archive for the website.
What Does the Alexa Rank Mean?
The general consensus seems to be a reluctant admittance by most (certainly not all) that there does indeed appear to be a rough correlation (seemingly with a LOT of outlying data points), between a site’s Alexa Rank and traffic for well-established websites that receive over and above a certain level of traffic.
In the article ‘How are Alexa’s traffic rankings determined?,’ Alexa notes that it doesn’t receive enough data from its sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. It also notes that the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.
Any website that has a rank higher than this 100,000 waypoint can almost be completely ignored, as the figure isn’t reliable.
Is Alex’s Ranking System Reliable?
It seems that a lot of people who have access to reliable web analytics data, such as Google Analytics of course), often report seeing web-traffic trends and statistics that appear to be completely out of line with the corresponding Alexa Rank for each site.
A quick Google search for ‘Is Alexa Rank Accurate?’ will indicate that many website owners do not trust Alexa’s ranking system.
Although, in all fairness, many of these reports reference websites with high Alexa Ranks that are in excess of the 100,000 mark.
At the heart of the problem, though, there seems to be two issues:
- Alexa isn’t able to gather its data from everybody (it obviously doesn’t have access to everybody’s browsing habits), and can only gather data from a subset of a few million users via certain browser extensions. A little common sense suggests this will almost certainly skew the data right from the get-go, since the average user presumably isn’t likely to have installed any such browser extensions.
- Rather than address such concerns head on and be completely open about exactly how this particular problem is accounted for, and show exactly how the underlying data is collected and used to calculate the rank, Alexa seems to be less than 100% transparent on the matter, simply stating that Alexa Rank ‘is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past three months’.
Hmmmm….
Are Alexa Ranks Important?
For most site owners, knowing how their website is doing against the competition is important. However, when assessing your own website my advice would be to simply stick with the data from Google Analytics as it will be more reliable.
Do not attribute any significant meaning to your site’s Alexa Rank.
When looking at competing sites, however, by all means take a quick peek at their Alexa Rank for a very rough idea of how popular their website is relative to yours. In the full Website Traffic Analysis report, Alexa shows you how your audience overlaps with competitors by examining the keywords in both websites and looking at audience demographics. This will help you to see how closely related your visitors are.
Please remember that Alexa Rank is just a rough guide on how websites rank in relation to each other. Therefore, it’s possible for your Alexa Rank to decrease, despite your website gaining thousands of new daily visitors. Additionally, if your website’s Alexa Rank is above the 100,000 mark, it’s probably best not to go attributing any significant meaning to comparing Alexa Ranks at all.
Conclusion
I personally hope that Alexa continues to work towards really getting this particular metric up to scratch because it sure would be nice to stick a number on each and every website that would allow us to compare and contrast them all with a decent level of accuracy.
Over the past ten years, Alexa has done a lot of work on increasing the accuracy of its ranking system by sourcing data from millions of additional users, but it would appear it’s still got a long way to go to regain the industry’s faith.
What do you think? Have you noticed Alexa Ranks becoming more accurate as it decreases? On a scale of one to ten, how much faith do you generally place in the accuracy of a site’s Alexa Rank?
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Thanks for this info. I’ve just recently come across Alexa ranking and so wanted to get a bit of an overview to see if it’s worth looking into in depth, but it seems that if you’re optimising your SEO anyway, you’re doing as much as you need to.
It’s still confusion about how important is Alexa rank to a site, I have seen many popular sites with very low Alexa rank. What will you say on this aspect ?
Very good Explain. Thank you so much
I used to trust Alexa for its ranking. Not anymore.. #1 website in Indonesia according to Alexa is okezone com, yet I asked my extended indo family and friends there and many of them dont know and not familiar with that site. what a BS!! I believe Top4 in Indonesia should be Google, FB, Youtube and IG.
i dont give a damn about Alexa rank and I know I’m not the only one. What a joke of a tool.
I noticed recently that my site doesnt register any traffic from search engines or other sites anymore. Traffic is coming from search engines but alexa is simply reporting none.
Has anything changed?
Thanks for sharing this fantastic blog, really very informative. Your writing skill is very good, you must keep writing this type of blogs.
Sorry — I meant Alexa and not Cortanna — R Wells
No doubt, quick search on Alexa tells us how popular the competitor site is. Over the past months, Alexa has changed a lot to better in terms of its UI, features and functionality.
Very genuine and helpful article on Alexa, Great job Brin Wilson!
Hey Brin!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the post.
Beginners mostly asses a website or blog by doing a quick check on Alexa, and that’s how Alexa has made its place on the Internet.
In fact, I do a regular check of my blog. I must admit that my blog rankings are getting better day to day after doing so many changes on my blog.
Even though by taking Alexa rank alone one cannot judge a website, it’s the overall content quality and UI all that matters to rank in terms of winning hearts of audience.
Awesome post! Thank you for pointing out the inaccuracies. Google Analytics does a good job of giving us the data we need.
I have read about the importance of the alexa rank. It’s really cool to find a high quality article here, describing even more about the topic! Thanks
I agree I was all to obsessed with Alexa rank. they should be incorporated as a piece to your overall website profile.
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this excellent blog!
I guess for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my
Google account. I look forward to brand new updates and
will share this site with my Facebook group. Talk soon!