Alexa Ranking – Facts

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and it has been popular because of the website ranking service offered for the websites. Alexa evaluates a website on the basis of its popularity among the Alexa Toolbar users and assigns a rank to it. The lower the rank value, the higher is the popularity. Through the ‘Alexa Toolbar’, Alexa also provides a lot of information about the website traffic and the user behavior for a particular website. With the help of this toolbar, the visitor to a website is appropriately guided in his search for a specific content in a website. It gives the detailed information about a website; for example, it shares information such as whom the website is registered with, how many pages it had, and how often it was updated, etc.

However, there is a serious flaw in the calculation of the website ranking by Alexa. Alexa rank is assigned to a website on the basis of the number of hits produced in it by the users who have installed the Alexa toolbar in their web browser. The Alexa toolbar is provided with a number of SEO tools, and therefore, it has been a popular tool bar among website owners. Thus, a common user may not find any specific use of this tool, and so he may not have installed it on his browser. Thus Alexa ranking is based on the number of the hits produced in a website by a selected group of users, not by a universal group of visitors.

The fact that Alexa ranking depends entirely on the users of the Alexa toolbar indicates that the Alexa ranking cannot be trusted, especially for the ranking of the not-so-popular websites. Those with the high ranking, for example, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc., are always ranked the highest by any ranking method; and Alexa also does not show much difference. However, the case with low-ranked websites is different. There are many websites, including many websites that are popular in one region or a country, that are given the least ranking by Alexa. This contradiction is a clear indication that the visitors of such websites do not possess the Alexa toolbar on their web browser.

There are other allegations over Alexa ranking that its ranking can be easily manipulated. There is one such claim that if a website that is ranked low by Alexa can be pushed to the top of its ranking list if a number of users use the particular website as their default home page. Also, the popularity of the website in Alexa can be increased by increasing the traffic to one’s website by different methods. If the website owner of a particular website decides to increase the Alexa ranking of his site, he can achieve it easily by requesting the known visitors of his website to install the Alexa toolbar. Thus Alexa ranking lacks authenticity.

Had Alexa used the software that is able to count every single hit produced in a website on a daily basis and assess its popularity, it would have been widely accepted as one of the best website ranking service.