-
-
-
-
-
Sponsored Ads
-
Recent Readers
Alexa Ratings Complete Rubbish
A tool too many webmasters and advertisers used to determine just how good your sites traffic really is. The site takes your daily traffic ratings and then compiles it into; today, weekly and three month averages.
Ja Kel Daily Dot Com at the time of writing this article is rated at a weekly average of 78,000 and the averages change daily depending on the traffic that your site has received. What you may not know is that this traffic is based completely off the traffic that has the Alexa Tool Bar installed not the entire web network of users. So if you are a Ja Kel Daily Reader please install the tool bar to help my ratings.
Knowledge is power! This is not a recommendation by me but what if let’s say you and ten of your friends install the Alexa Tool Bar and just keep refreshing each others websites through out the day what happens. That’s right your Alexa page ratings have just gone up.
The funny thing is that many ads sites such as Text Link Ads and Adbrite to name a couple use Alexa rating to determine the sell price of your ads on your site. The higher you rating the more your links sell for. Seems really illogical that companies use a rating system that is defective and this is public knowledge. Maybe there is a fix coming soon – comment if you know anything.
Like I said I did not recommend for anyone to give this a try. Remember your sites reputation and you would not want to ruin any chances of getting approved or if you or already have ad companies on your site.
If you want to try this my suggestion would be if you want to experiment open up a free blogger account and install the Alexa Tool Bar and then start the experiment.
comments
Maybe You Missed These Posts:
- Two Blogs One Domain Double Power
- Ten Simple Trust Building Techniques
- The Mentor – Think Before You Open Your Mouth
- How To Increase Links and Traffic
- What Does My Website Rank
- Ja Kel Daily Dot Com - Stats
- Is Blogging Consistency Important?
11 Responses to “Alexa Ratings Complete Rubbish”
Leave a Reply
I’ve heard this same story about Alexa Ratings on quite a few other blogs. It seems pretty universal that the system is widely inaccurate but somehow it’s still highly influential in so many areas including advertising ranks.
I always thought the obvious solution was to embed that sort of functionality into IE and Firefox at the browser level. With just those two browsers, you would have almost all browser traffic covered. There would be some users with privacy concerns but it would be simple to have a disable switch built in. If it was built into the core and turned on by default then 99% of people would simply leave it alone and we could have some really good metrics. If this hasn’t been done though I’m guessing there are good reasons why. It mustn’t be as easy as I’m envisioning.
I’m not sure the same user hitting the refresh key on their browser would count? Surely it would be a bit more complex than that and at least take account of the IP address.
i have been saying this for years. couldnt agree more with you. the alexa system has been flawed since day one. its totally unreliable but its frightening how many new ad networks are using it as a measure of a sites worth.
also, watch out if you dont privacy protect your domain names. they openly display your whois info on your site and then list all of your other sites. not the sort of thing you want displayed so openly if you run a community or blog.
I just tried to install the Alexa toolbar via your link but since I use Firefox, no dice.
I then clicked on the Alexa for Firefox users link they had, but it went on blah, blah, blah…stuff.
Too much trouble!
I hope our Alexa rankings still rise!
I believe that Alexa collects information from other sources as well. Obviously just as Google is very secertive about their algorithyms Alexa is difficult to read on exactly how they determine traffic. I believe that the Alexa traffic badges also contribute to how they gauge traffic. My site has a very low number of visitors at present and only 50% of the users are using IE. Based on that only 50% of my visitors have the potential to be running the Alexa toolbar and odds are there are less than 100% of the IE users running the toolbar there can’t be many users running the toolbar visiting my site. But my site is still pulling a ranking of over 600k but only after I dropped the button in for showing my ranking. Prior to adding the button there was no data for my site.
While I imagine that the more visitors you have running the better your rank I can’t believe that this measurement is merely run by the toolbar. I already have way to many toolbars on my system so I won’t bother to use the Alexa version as it doesn’t provide any features I don’t already have.
I agree with Paula and Nullvariable…too much trouble. Who wants to deal with another toolbar. Besides, your post and others shows how unreliable the Alexa information really is.
I have read other articles that confirm the measurement is merely run by the toolbar, or heavily weighted that way. If your gaming the toolbar, you are only fooling yourself.
There are better ways to build traffic me thinks.
Oops! Sorry, Jason — my bad.
I followed your link and then found the SearchStatus thingee to download Alexa Toolbar for Firefox and I realized it DID work.
The Alexa Rank (as well as Google’s PageRank) shows up on the bottom of my screen at the right. I was looking for it at the top.
Plus, I put my Alexa graphic in a prominent place on my blog — so hopefully this will move up my Alexa Rank from 191,000-something where it is now.
I believe it will work!
Thanks so much for the great post — ignore my cranking comment I left before…
Paula
To Paula:
Crap, now I have to reconsider Alexa. Thanks for the update.
Back from the Maldives Now:
Great input, thanks. Well whatever the sources or statics are I am still going to work on getting ranked as high as possible because it generates traffic when you get into the top movers or top 10,000 and I want more traffic…
OK, so more traffic is good. I am back here checking to see if there are any update on this.
Any updates from experiments?
undeniable alexa rank is still important for a blog or website … u can also use compete dot come or a similar service, but still, alexa is the most powerful nowadays.