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If you have never heard of Alexa ranking before you are not necessarily in
the minority. Alexa is a tool used primarily by techies but is catching on quickly
among the general population using the internet. Alexa is a very powerful tool
of viewing and comparing web site traffic for one site to the rest of the web.
Basically, Alexa says this is the most visited site on the Internet. But what
is Alexa and how do they rank sites?
Alexa is a company owned by Amazon.com which has as its main purpose to improve
web navigation through participation from its users. Alexa does a lot more than
simple rank web sites; they also have data services and webmaster services designed
to improve the web. However, the focus of this article is Alexa’s Ranking
system.
First, to even view a ranking on a site you must either go to www.alexa.com
and type in the site you want information about or do what the majority of people
do: install the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. When you install the Alexa
toolbar on your browser any site you visit displays its Alexa ranking on the
toolbar. You can simply click on this ranking (a number) and you will then be
directed to Alexa’s website where you can view more information about the
website including reviews posted by users and viewing a detailed traffic analysis
for the site. But, the most important aspect of installing the toolbar is not
that you can view the ranking of a site easy, but that when you install the
Alexa toolbar every site you visit is monitored by Alexa and recorded. Now,
Alexa is not keeping tabs on you, but this is how they rank sites.
When you have the Alexa toolbar installed every site you visit in a given day
is given a vote for that day. If you visit a site multiple times during the
day you visit is only counted once. Alexa, however, doesn’t stop there;
it watches how many pages you view on that site and records that as well and
will continually count the number of pages you view throughout the day (however
viewing the same page over and over will only count once). Alexa calls the counting
of each visit “reach” and the counting of page visits “page views.”
Every day Alexa takes these two figures, and the figures from the last three
months and calculates the traffic rank for each web site by applying a geometric
mean (i.e., math) calculation to them. From these calculations Alexa ranks sites.
The ranking is from the number one site (ranking one) to as many sites as there
are. The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site.
What is interesting and advantageous in looking at Alexa rankings is that Alexa
rates a site for the traffic which has visited over a period of months. This
gives a stable realistic view of a site measure of traffic and how it ranks
compared to other sites. By using a three month period the Alexa rankings are
less subject to manipulation or by a one time spike in page views. Now, it is
not perfect. Alexa only calculates for websites in their database because in
order to get counted a site has to be visited by someone with a toolbar installed.
And everyone doesn’t have a toolbar installed. So there may be a site visited
every day by thousands of people not in Alexa rankings. But, it is probably
very rare. Just looking at the top sites you can see that the heavily used sites
on the Internet are ranked very low in Alexa. Here are some samples: amazon.com
(rank 14); weather.com (rank 64); cnn.com (rank 26); google.com (rank 5); Yahoo.com
(rank 1). These rankings are generally consistent with the amount of traffic
they have.
Now there is quite a bit more to Alexa and Alexa rankings but this is enough
to get you started. But, when someone mentions they have an Alexa ranking of
xyz or they say they are the most visited site on the web you now know what
is going on.
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