Alexa Ranking means nothing
Recently, I've been seeing more and more marketers refer to Alexa Ranking as if it was something important; a measure of success…
Alexa Ranking means nothing! It is simply the number of times that someone with an Alexa Toolbar visits your site. Thus, if you have a site dedicated to Alexa Toolbar widgets, it is likely you'll have a regular stream of Alexa'ised visitors, consequently your Alexa rating will be high.
A good example of this; this very blog. Alexa Ranking of about 58,000 [as of today, 14 July 2006], but only 100 subscribers according to Feedburner. Unique visitors are not massive - I have a different site with ten times the number of uniques, but Alexa ranking is in the 400,000 range.
Why is the blog quite so high?
I'm guessing that a number of readers have the Alexa Toolbar installed. The demographic of this blog is likely to have a number of user with it installed, as most will be entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs or marketers. Note that I do not have the toolbar installed, so I am not skewing stats…
Next time you see a marketer trying to impress with Alexa numbers, please realise that it's an unimportant factor which has no relevance whatsoever to anything at all.
I have seen one (in)famous marketer who sells his whole service on the basis that his site is very high in Alexa, around top 1000 or so. Once inside the members area, he advises people to install Alexa to skew their own stats. Snake-Oil salesman.
Recently though, I noticed a few 3rd parties who use Alexa as a way of determining value, an example seems to be www.text-link-ads.com - I sell some links via the site, and seems to be that the higher the Alexa rank, the more the link costs the buyer. Are there any more such services who base worth on Alexa ranking?
Comment by Chance — July 14, 2006 @ 6:22 pm
There are more than a few FireFox extensions that request Alexa data now- I've seen huge growth in rankings too and I suspect that's the cause. Most of the extensions are "Google enhancers", "ranking checkers" and the like.
You're right though, Alexa is worthless for rankings- people who care about such show how novice they really are
Comment by Nir Dahan — July 16, 2006 @ 9:37 am
I encountered the same questions regarding the alexa rankings.
I have a pretty new webpage, and number of unique visitors is increasing by the day, yet the alexa ranking is only crawling up slowly.
Thanks for clarifying this point,
Nir
http://www.bidthegrid.com
Comment by Gil — July 25, 2006 @ 8:05 pm
thanks for the clarification…although my site has jumped up in the past couple of days it's nice to know that only a % of users are actually accounted for…what about the Reach portion is that tied to this too?