What is Alexa rank?
This is a ranking system set by alexa.com (a subsidiary of Amazon.com) that basically audits the frequency of visits on various Websites. Your Alexa Rank is an estimate of how popular your site is relative to all other sites.
How does Alexa get its data?
Alexa has a large traffic data panel consisting of millions of people all over the world. Based on the data from this sample, Alexa estimates the number of visitors to all sites on the Internet.
It’s a complicated calculation that involves correcting for biases as well as identifying and discarding fake or spam traffic.
How is the Alexa Ranking determined?
It is based on the amount of traffic recorded from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed over a period of three months. This traffic is based on parameters such as reach and page views.
The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day. Page view is the number of times a particular page (URL) is viewed by Alexa users.
If a particular user visits the same URL multiple times on the same day, all those visits will be counted as one. There are limits to statistics based on the data available.
Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Enough data from the sources are not received to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful.
This means that, for example, the difference in traffic between a site ranked 1,000,000 and a site ranked 2,000,000 has low statistical significance.
Sites ranked 100,000+ may be subject to large ranking swings due to the scarcity of data for those sites. It is not unusual for such sites to decline to “No data” Traffic Ranks, or to improve suddenly.
With Alexa, the smaller the numerical ranking, the better.
What are the advantages of Alexa rank?
- Alexa ranking can be used as a competitive tool to know the traffic for other websites.
- It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the true marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they will be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.
- Showcasing your traffic statistics and true audience size can help you attract potential customers.
- Lesser your Alexa ranking is, the better quality traffic you can get.
- Personal pages or blogs are taken into consideration and ranked in the same manner as regular Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*).
- Alexa Certified Metrics only counts real traffic. They filter out web crawlers and other unnecessary “noise” which can artificially inflate your metrics. This provides you a clear picture of your true traffic metrics, allowing you to make better business decisions based on genuine data.
- Alexa Certified Metrics makes performance tracking easy by continually monitoring your site’s uptime. They display your uptime next to your traffic graphs allowing you to cross-correlate traffic trends with your site’s availability and technical issues.