Alexa Ranking: Tips

[TUTTI]

Here's a concern from an internet marketer:

"I have seen PR1 websites having an alexa ranking. I have a PR2 website and still has no alexa ranking.
Can anybody provide some tip or solution?"

Your answers will be well taken
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As I understand it, Alexa ranking is based only on traffic, not PR (PageRank). PR is Google's way of determining a websites popularity. Google PageRank (PR) is based on the value of incoming links to your site. Alexa rankings are based on the number of times people who use the Alexa Toolbar visit a site. Alexa rankings are to websites what Nielsen ratings are to television.

Read the limitations of the ratings on the Alexa website. Short version: The ranking of web sites over 100,000 are increasingly less reliable. For example, there may not be much difference from a site ranked 750,000 and one ranked 900,000.

Here are two tips for increasing your Alexa ranking:

1. Continue to build a high-quality site with content people want and do all the other things you probably know about to attract more traffic to your site.

2. Install the Alexa Toolbar on Internet Explorer (it doesn't work with Firefox) and everytime you visit your site, make sure you use IE with the Alexa Toolbar on. I know it sounds crazy but do it as an experiment for 3 months and see if it makes a difference in your Alexa ranking. I bet it will.
Encourage your regular website visitors to use the Alexa Toolbar too.
Alexa ranking is based ONLY on the amount of times your site is visited by someone with the Alexa toolbar installed.

 

[Larwee]

I am not a fan of Alexa. I like for information to be accurate and reliable. Alexa falls very short when it comes to these very important points. The simple fact is a lot of people pay way more attention to Alexa than they should and are under the false impression that the Alexa information is close to being accurate.

I should also mention that some anti-spyware programs considers Alexa to be spyware.

The television industry has confidence in the Nielsen television ratings. There is a much more scientific approach taken with them.

The Alexa Toolbar is much more popular in some countries than it is in others. That can lead to painting a false picture. As an example, there are a very large number of Korean sites that rank very high on Alexa.

The Alexa Toolbar isn't available to users of all browsers. That leaves out a growing percentage of users.

The Alexa Toolbar is a lot more popular among certain groups of people than others. For example, it is much more popular among webmasters than it is among the general population. As a result sites that are visited by webmaters are going to look to be much more popular than they really are.

I really do like 5 Star and 5 Star has a very good Alexa ranking. But I must be honest and say that 5 Star isn't nearly as popular as the Alexa ranking indicates. 5 Star has a better Alexa ranking than many large metropolitan newspaper and television sites that have SEVERAL TIMES as much traffic as 5 Star.

Add to this the fact that there are programs and services which, for a fee, will take steps to increase the Alexa ranking of their customers. There are people who use these programs and services.

If that isn't bad enough, a person can improve his or her own Alexa ranking by simply installing the Alexa Toolbar and visiting their own site. No one in the world could be visiting the site but the owner and it really isn't that hard for the owner to easily get the site to rank within the top 100,000. That is a total joke for something such as that to be possible.

But there are some people who do value the Alexa rankings and believe they are accurate. This isn't lost on some people who want to sell sites. They do things to give themselves a higher Alexa ranking and then talk about it the Alexa ranking as a positive when trying to sell their site.

If the Nielsen television ratings were as far of, as easily manipulated and as unrepresentative of the audience as the Alexa rankings are, the television industry would have stopped relying on them decades ago.

I was tempted to say that the Alexa rankings should be taken with a grain of salt, but even that would be giving more credit than is deserved.