Jun 3

Written by: Dylan Barber
6/3/2009 12:26 PM 

Usually I stay away from posts like this because I end up with my foot in my mouth but its starting to get to me more and more. Many people and sites try to gauge how popular a site is by where its rank is on Alexa.com. If you haven’t used or looked at Alexa please do so you can see what I am talking about, I’ll wait for you.

Back? Okay!

‘What’s the problem?’ Alexa uses a browser toolbar to track what sites are visited and for how long. Supposedly they don’t collect personal information but that a different discussion. Using this information they rank your site against other sites.  Now the hilarious thing is computer technical sites rank consistently lower than comparable non technical sites. I suppose one reason is that computer techies and geeks don’t install these tool bars all that much (too many problems and increases load times for the browser). The main demographic for these type of sites is totally ignored and discounted or at least skewed to the low end.  So the ranking is totally unfounded. How many other demographic specific type of sites are ignored because of this?

‘So what? Just ignore Alexa.’ I would love to, but if you are trying to buy, sell, or even value a site everyone looks at Alexa rankings as one of the factors in determining the value of a domain. BuySellAds.com won’t really consider a site as a publisher unless its rank is under 500,000 on Alexa*. I don’t blame BuySellAds for having standards it just seems the standard is skewed.

*BuySellAds.com has other criteria but I have been told not to really bother unless my ranking is higher than 500K.

‘Whats the alternative?’ I don’t have an answer to this. In my opinion Google analytics is a much better gauge or real history and potential but it has to be set up on the site in question. As a developer and designer I have time and effort involved in my sites and I love them and think they are valuable. The thing I want other developers and web marketers to consider is that just because Alexa says you have little or no traffic doesn’t mean no one looks at the site or it has no value. Don't make Alexa the end of your research into a sites history or traffic potential.

 

Alexa.com is owned by Amazon.com.