Comments on: The myth of Alexa traffic rankings

By: angelchen

angelchen — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:55:32 +0000

Yes, it’s extremely easy to manipulate, I tried the alexa boosting autosurf for one day and my blog’s alexa ranking became around 6,000,000 next day, but in reality it has only around ten visitors per day.

By: Harvey

Harvey — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:40:18 +0000

I couldn’t think of a single internet professional that uses IE, let alone one that would be fool enough to install the alexa toolbar.

Surely, it’s the n00bs that would install the alexa toolbar?

I say this because a SEO site of mine gets about 45% Firefox traffic and a fair chunk of Safari, whereas most other sites get about 10% Firefox and 85% IE.

I would be very surprised if this is true, but then stranger things have happened.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:47:00 +0000

Any idea if Google or Yahoo will ever make site stats collected from their toolbars available to the general public? I know, pipe dreams…

–jb

By: Rishi Khaitan

Rishi Khaitan — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:09:02 +0000

Ange,

No, I would not say that Alexa rank is more important than Google PR. Far from it. As you know, PR is going to directly improve your site by bringing users to your site. Because organic search engine traffic costs you nothing, it is the most effective of improving your site’s traffic.

As I mentioned in the post, Alexa rank is generally of interest only to industry pundits, journalists, investors, etc. These are the only types of people who might use your Alexa ranking to analyze traffic on your site. For startups, these types of people can influence the success of the venture and for this reason the Alexa rank is something that shouldn’t be ignored.

Yes, Alexa rank can be manipulated to an extent using auto-surf sites and other techniques. Alexa, and other traffic metric services, are inherently not that accurate to begin with. However, in all fairness, there are plenty of SEO techniques that can be employed to manipulate search engine rankings.

By: Ange Pat

Ange Pat — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 02:21:27 +0000

Are we saying that Alexa rank is more important than Google page rank?

And can’t you also beat the Alexa ranking by using auto-surf sites or can Alexa penalize a site for doing so?

By: lawrence

lawrence — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:51:57 +0000

Nice post Rishi.

Here’s a little data – last week RateItAll was written up by both John Battelle’s Search Blog and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable.

We got about 200 visitors combined from the two posts (on a day which we did close to 30K uniques).

It was quality traffic, and we very much appreciated it.

But we’re talking about a net boost in traffic of under 1%.

Yet our Alexa reach for the day tripled – from about 100 per million to about 300 per million.

An tiny influx of tech savvy visitors, some of whom have the Alexa toolbar, was enough to triple our “reach.”

I think it’s preposterously misleading how a number of very influential bloggers (and guys who should know better) insist on touting a site’s success or failure by checking their Alexa rankings.

Doesn’t anyone besides Rishi understand this?