Why Alexa Matters

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I have never really been concerned with Alexa rank. At best, the information it provides is a very general metric to how much traffic a site actually receives. The information it bases it’s stats on is compiled from the amount of visitors a site gets that actually have the Alexa toolbar software installed.The Alexa toolbar can also only be installed on the Internet Explorer browser. I this day and age, with so many (better) different web browsers being used, Alexa ranking value is somewhat diminished. So why should you care? Today, getting accurate statistics on a website that you do not own can be very difficult. Many advertising networks now factor Alexa ranking into judging how valuable a site is. For example, Text Link Ads and ReviewMe both use Alexa Ranking to judge how much you get paid for linking to an advertiser. Many of the top CPM advertising networks also use Alexa data to determine if you are eligible to participate in their campaigns and join their network. With the online advertising industry getting so competitive, if you are an advertiser, it appears in your best interest to have a higher Alexa rank. Some people also use Alexa Ranking as a selling point when selling their website. Many, if not most of the online publishing industry will be in agreement that Alexa statistics are skewed at best. Sitepoint member KLB pointed out a while back that a simple script allowing you to artificially inflate your Alexa ranking. I tested this out and can confirm that run on one machine a day, this will increase your Alexa rank to well over 50k. This experiment was done on a site not made public by search engines or advertising. In fact, it was not even indexed in any. This just goes to show how meaningless an Alexa ranking can really be. So next time you judge a site's popularity based on its Alexa ranking, make sure you can back it up by checking the amount of quality backlinks it has, along with its pagerank/sitescore and common sense on the quality of its content. David Davis, is the lead internet marketing strategy manager of Redfly Marketing Internet Marketing Ireland. For more information visit http://www.redflymarketing.com