 Alexa FAQS |
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| wildfoxsx |
 19 January 2012 10:25 Post #1
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 sss
Reputation: 0 Group: Editor Post: 8 Registration: 23.09.2011 ICQ:-- |
A lot of people come here wondering how to make sense of Alexa's website rankings or improve them. Over and over, our esteemed SEOs tell these innocents that Alexa Rank is meaningless and worthless, but, unlike sarcasm, a clear explanation of why this is so is often lacking. It's as if we have made a sport of sorts out of poking fun at those who ask about Alexa. I hope that this FAQ will reduce the amount of such pointless Q&A cycles. Alexa's ranking system, as currently implemented, is indeed wildly inaccurate for the overwhelming majority of sites (yes, this includes yours!). It is very easy to explain and understand why this is so. This FAQ answers the following questions: What is Alexa? How Does Alexa Measure Traffic Levels? Is Alexa Rank Accurate? Does Alexa Rank Have Legitimate Uses? Does Alexa Rank Affect Google PageRank? Does Alexa Rank Affect Search Rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo! Etc.? What Else Should I Know About Alexa Rankings? Can Alexa Be Gamed? How Can I Improve My Alexa Rank? What is Alexa? Alexa.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, is a website that purports to rank all sites according to their traffic levels: the higher the traffic, the lower the rank number. The site with the lowest rank (Alexa’s rank 1 currently belongs to Google) is plausibly the most visited website in the world. How Does Alexa Measure Traffic Levels? It turns out that Alexa does it based on the Web activities of users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. From the horse's mouth: "Alexa could not exist without the active participation of the Alexa Toolbar community. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Simply by using the Toolbar, each member contributes valuable information about the web: how it's used, what's important and what's not. This information is given back to the community as Traffic Rankings, Related Links and more." (See http://www.alexa.com/tour/toolbar.) Is Alexa Rank Accurate? It immediately follows from the above that Alexa's measurements are largely worthless and potentially highly misleading for the huge majority of sites. A tiny minority of all Web users have the Alexa toolbar installed. This "useful tool"'s purpose is to report Alexa rankings, so the circle is vicious. I would not be surprised if the only people who used the toolbar were those trying to improve their own site's Alexa standing (more on this below). Does Alexa Rank Have Legitimate Uses? Yes. Since users of the Alexa toolbar represent a statistically tiny portion of all Internet users, the amount of available information and hence the accuracy of Alexa's ranking increases proportionally to a site's total Web traffic. For the most visited sites like Yahoo, Ebay, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and others, Alexa rank indeed represents their relative popularity quite reliably. Alexa's "top sites" lists contain good information, but if your site is not one of the Internet giants, its Alexa rank is probably so inaccurate as to be quite meaningless. Does Alexa Rank Affect Google PageRank? No. Does Alexa Rank Affect Search Rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo! Etc.? No. What Else Should I Know About Alexa Rankings? Know that there is a whole lot of confusion and deception revolving around them. Shady webmasters and SEOs often use Alexa Rank to lie to gullible customers about the importance of the sites they try to sell. Ad networks such as ReviewMe, Text Link Ads, Sponsored Reviews and others, use Alexa Rank to assess the value of ads and links on websites. (This is because AlexRank is the a publicly available measure of the popularity sites whose traffic is too low to be captured by QuantCast or Compete.com). This, combined with the fact that the Alexa system is too liable to easy gaming, further contributes to making Alexa rankings meaningless. There is a giant discrepancy between Alexa's real and perceived importance. Can Alexa Be Gamed? Alexa's official position is: "Our traffic engineers constantly review the traffic data we receive from our users and remove any attempts at artificial manipulation. Our methods evolve as the cheating does, and on the whole, our methods are successful." (http://www.alexa.com/help/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15281) This appears to be a face-saving lie. When users point out their own success in manipulation, Alexa's response is: "I can't go into details (because if I give details on how our cheating prevention works, then someone could try to use that information to cheat, obviously)" (http://www.alexa.com/help/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15101). Well, duh. By all accounts, Alexa lends itself to easy gaming. How Can I Improve My Alexa Rank? Reportedly, it is very easy to reduce your Alexa Rank to a mere 100,000. People who don't know any better will believe that your site is in the world's 100,000 most popular sites, which would sound like an achievement if it were not BS. To increase your Alexa rank, whether for vanity's sake or in order to deceive fellow humans about your site's importance, follow these simple steps: -- Install the Alexa toolbar (or the SearchStatus toolbar in Firefox) on all your computers. -- Set your site as your homepage. -- Incite your site’s users to download the Alexa toolbar (put in a link for that purpose). -- Post your URL in webmaster forums and ask for feedback. Webmasters are just the people who have the Alexa plugin plugged in. -- Provide content and tools for webmasters. -- Provide Alexa-related content (this will bring droves of Alexa-toolbar-wielding traffic). There are other, more involved methods, including as Alexa auto-surfs and Alexa redirects and embedding the Alexa Rank Widget. These may or may not work for the purpose stated. Lastly (and if you have read this far, this one may not be for you): consider focusing on the quality of your website and on gaining genuine traffic without worrying about the Alexa BS. Just forget about it! |
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| Viney |
28 January 2012 13:22 Post #2
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| sss
Reputation: -- Group: Guests Post: 0 Registration: -- ICQ:-- |
That's a genuinely impressive aswner. |
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1 Person read this topic (Guests: 1)
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| Now: 18 May 2012 09:33 |
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