Comments on: What do those Alexa rankings mean …

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 13:55:13 +0000

Yahoo – 1
MSN – 2
Google – 3

Those are rankings, plain and simple. All three sites are ranked using the same flawed criteria. The playing field is level. Therefore, if you were Google, would you complain about the inequaties in the system because Yahoo is number One.

That being said, a script that caters to web developers and SEO specialists should have an incredibly higher percentage of toolbar users than a site that sells arts and crafts.

By: Gareth Powell

Gareth Powell — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:41:38 +0000

It seems to me that there are few publicly reliable statistics on the Internet. Alexa is useful as a relative guide to position – but that is about it. Looking at it every day or taking the figure as gospel is dangerous. But it is a measuring tool of sorts.
So is Google positioning. It is very broad, pretty loose. But it is a guide to where you site stands. True, there is often appears to be no connection between the two and it is undoubtedly English-language biased.
What I would like to know is whether there is anything better. I have not found anything.

Gareth

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 00:17:40 +0000

Nicole:

Thanks. It seems to give identical traffic and rating stats for all blogs at blogger.com – I actually think it lumps us together as one – the figures appear to relate to blogger.com itself, as a conglomeration of all the blogs, or in it’s own right.

It just means that unless I switch blog hosts, Alexa ratings will be completely useless to/for me.
If you want to check that out, just go to Alexa.com and enter the URL of any ‘Blogger’ blog you want.

By: Alexa Rankings: Not to be Trusted | Define Blog

Alexa Rankings: Not to be Trusted | Define Blog — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:23:15 +0000

[...] e Trusted

June 21, 2005 |
No Comments

A recent article over at ProBlogger touches on the topic of Alexa [...]

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 09:26:04 +0000

Reimer: Sie. Nicht er. *g*

Duncan: Yes, as part of that and on english not so technical sites, agreed. :) But on the more technical sites, you can use Technorati and co. And I assume, the more top you are, the more ups and down you have.

Cheryl: Perhaps because 33 is such a pretty number? :) 33 is compared to what? In which period? (Do you have a url for that perhaps?)

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 08:42:43 +0000

I’m a completely confused (and slow) newbie, but,

Only half my visitors use MSIE
Most (I’m new at this) surf in for the requisite 30 seconds at BlogExplosion.
I am happy to get 4 comments a day.

Why does Alexa say I reach 15,000 in a million, amd why does it say my blogger.com rank (and the rank of the other three blogger blogs I tested, is 33? Why are we ALL at 33?

Bonkers. Hands up, I have a quiet little blog that Alexa says is screaming up the charts, so someone’s doing something wrong…..

By: WebhostingTech » Archiv » Wie die Top10 der deutschen Webhoster bestimmen?

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:08:14 +0000

[...] es Ranking basiert auf den Statistiken der Amazontochter Alexa und auch der Problogger �bt Kritik an diesen Statistiken. Es werden laut ihm [...]

By: duncan

duncan — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:56:18 +0000

Alexa is useless as a true measurement of traffic but it is a handy tool to measure a blogs position in a general consumer market because I’ve always guessed that people who use Alexa tend to be less tech savy then say the average blogger or geek (do you know anyone in your immediate circle for example that uses the Alexa Toolbar?), its also not a bad way of getting a feel for where a blog sits in general, for example a site that claims to do 1/2 million page views a month is likely to feature prominently in Alexa, if its not its likely not to be doing the reported figures (a truth checker if you like). Its also not to bad for doing rough comparisons with other blogs.

Having said all of this if I lived and died by my Alexa stats I’d have died from a nervous breakdown: 1 day I can be ranked 40,000 the next can be 150,000 and there is little rhyme nor reason, but I do use it daily as part of my stats round up, mainly just to see what that particular market place is doing.

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:40:59 +0000

Of course, if I want to sell something and they suit my needs, I could use them to argue a better price! “Look at this great Alexa ranking, you know, Alexa from Amazon!”

*hrmpf* I am too restrained by my upraising to take advantage on such things ;)

But of course, this applies to all statistics you really know what is behind them.

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:36:18 +0000

Again, I guess it was one of those posts where I thought someone on Problogger was saying something counter intuative to what I believed to be true, only to find out that you and I are on the same page.

Looking back over your post, I see now that it is more of a post on helping those that believe Alexa is “the” tool for performance metrics understand that it is not all some people hold it to be. Too much cola…I have to lay off it a bit.

Great stuff! : )

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:33:49 +0000

Oh, I absolutly agree with you on that, I was not aware that it sounded as if I had another opinion! :)

Now, I don’t think that Alexa is one of the better tools either, but it is taken by many people as being authorative – and they need to know what they built their opinion on. It is kind of cute, but that is about it.

And let’s not even get into “do we want many visitors or the right visitors”. ;)

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:29:02 +0000

I guess you are right there. Alexa ranks things very differently, but I still think my points are valid in that it is just not effective enough to use as your sole identifier of how well your blog/site is doing.

Maybe taking small bits of information for use of a comparison would be fine, but to depend on Alexa or to even suggest to use this as a comparison tool, might be a little flawed… I think it takes multiple tools to really build up a good idea of how a site is doing, and I don’t think Alexa is even one of the better tools to do that.

It could be, but it isn’t. And I don’t know anyone that has that toolbar installed.

By: Nicole Simon

Nicole Simon — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:25:19 +0000

Web site stats and Alexa rank are different things, and for example if you don’t take care of setting up your usual web reporting correctly (regarding the rss feed requests), they are useless too.

But, if you take your Alexa ranking and the tools you might use around them, and don’t forget in which way they are flawed, you can work with them. Just like you can with feedburner statistics – you just need to know how to handle them. :)

By: David

David — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:13:21 +0000

Why not just tell the truth… These stats are more or less useless. Even worse, they are not updated often enough to be reliable at all. I think that clicking the little sitemeter graph (if you are a member) at the bottom of your page, or jumping over to your real server stats (most hosting has it) is probably the best way to go. AWStats and all its fancy info is pretty close to perfect in my opinion, and the only thing I use Alexa for is to get thumbnails of sites that are either down or have recently redesigned (since they don’t update site images very often).