Alexa Rankings - Getting A Fair Rank

What Is Alexa?

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites. It uses a sampling approach where data is gathered from alexa toolbar users to rank websites by estimated volume of traffic.

Why Is Alexa Interesting?

Whether you value your Alexa traffic ranking or not there are definite advantages to having a high AlexRank. Many webmasters and business folk look at the AlexaRank as a reasonable representation of a siteâ€™s traffic. If you are selling advertising from your site the more â€œproofâ€ you can demonstrate of your traffic - and in AlexaRankâ€™s case it is an independent valuation of your traffic, which adds credibility - the more likely advertisers will come knocking at your door willing to give you some of their ad budget.

How Is It AlexaRank Calculated?

Your AlexaRank is calculated using the Alexa Toolbar (or even similar toolbars using the Alexa’s system such as a very popular one called Search Status). Alexa takes the browsing data from the millions of people using the Toolbar and calculates the traffic ranking of each site. As Alexa states, while low traffic sites are harder to gauge accurately, once a site reaches a 100,000 or less ranking the accuracy of the measure increases. Hence if you can top a 10,000 AlexaRank, or even 1000, the credibility of that ranking is increased.

How Accurate Is AlexaRank?

Many have stated that they managed to “gameâ€ the AlexaRank. For example if you have Alexa Toolbar (or such) installed on your computer, then these tools will then send data to Alexa, and when Alexa receives any data about your surfing habits it will raise the traffic rankings for the sites you provide data for - and if you visit your own sites often you can raise your ranking.

With the Alexa Toolbar installed, there are programs and websites out there that will send a huge amount of traffic using different Proxies to “game” your Alexa Toolbar into thinking that many different “in other words unique” users are actually visiting your website thus giving an overall boost to your Alexa Rank.

Giving Your AlexaRank A Fair View

Gaming Alexa might increase your AlexaRank however this will not be giving you or anyone a true and fair value of your website’s rank. Apart from that however many users nowadays (with the increase of Anti-Spyware applications that mark Alexa in Internet Explorer as spyware and remove it) might be visiting your website without the Alexa Toolbar installed. Basically this means that they will not be sending in their browsing statistics, making your website traffic look much less then it really is.

Now imagine you get every single visitor of your website to install the Alexa Toolbar. If that is so then every single unique visitor would be counted as traffic for your website, giving you a fair and deserved AlexaRank. However to get everyone to install the Alexa Toolbar might prove hard, so there is a simple work-around In order to do this.

The obvious solution would be to install an Alexa Site Widget. The Alexa Widget tool needs to be installed on your website (using simple copy and paste code) thus it is downloaded automatically by every person who visits your site. The widget looks like this (it can also be visually hidden so basically you would be just like using a normal Tracking Code):

How Does This Work Fair ?

This is really very simple: If every visitor to your website downloads automatically the Alexa site widget when they visit your site, then Alexa would have statistical data on every visitor you have. Installing the site widget in fact helps to give Alexa enough data to provide your true AlexaRank, as opposed to what it thinks it should be based on the data it has from itâ€™s toolbar users.

If you sell advertising from your blog or website then you should care about your AlexaRank. If that is the case then installing the Alexa site widget is a must. It takes only a few seconds and could significantly improve your current AlexaRank.

Click here to get instructions on installing the Alexa site widget >>

Bookmark / Share: