Alexa is the company that analyzes and provides website traffic of the websites. (Alexa is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com
You can see the statistics and traffic from any website by writing the website URL and searching it from Alexa.
You can try it right away in Alexa.com if you want.
Here is, for example, the some statistics of the highly popular social media website, Pinterest.com.
Alexa also gives statistics of the many other metrics where are the people located using that site, how engaged people are, what is their gender, education and so on. (You can follow me on Pinterest.)
But how reliable Alexa rankings really are and is it important to get your Alexa ranking better? Let’s find out!
How Does Alexa Get Their Data?
Alexa gets their data from people who have installed Alexa toolbar in their browsers. Alexa then tracks the traffic of those users and gets the statistics according to the users of the toolbar.
There are also other plugins and toolbars that Alexa uses to track their traffic.
Still, Alexa certainly doesn’t get the track from all of the users on the internet but only a little amount of it.
Alexa ranking can give you some insight of your website popularity and traffic but it’s not the most reliable one. There are many reasons why you shouldn’t concentrate on the Alexa ranking too much.
If you want to know how your (or any other) website is ranked in Google I recommend you to use Jaaxy. It’s Free to start and very easy to use.
Example from the Successful Online Entrepreneur
The highly successful Online Entrepreneur and creator of the Wealthy Affiliate Kyle told his own experience. He wanted to test the reliability of Alexa by his own websites. He has many own websites and he chose to compare two of them, let’s call them Website A and Website B.
Website A got unique 20,000+ visitors per day while Website B got “only” 1,000+ visitors per day. So according to that, Website A’s Alexa ranking must be way better than B’s ranking. Was it?
NO! Website B was getting actually double the traffic that A was getting according to Alexa. So Alexa’s ranking and statistics were totally false.
You Can Actually Buy Alexa Rankings
There are different tools and packages that Alexa sells. I don’t recommend them. You can get the same (and actually more accurate) information for free from other tools like Google Analytics.
Alexa rankings aren’t reliable also for the reason that there are many ways to manipulate the Alexa traffic.
If you are interested in that kind of tools you can find them on Google but I don’t recommend to use them because Alexa ranking is not so important. Use your money for better tools like for Wealthy Affiliate premium to learn more about earning money online.
Alexa Ranking Tells Something but…
According to Alexa, top-ranked web pages on the internet are
1.Google
2.Facebook
3.Youtube
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Yahoo, Wikipedia, Twitter and Amazon are also in the top 10. So we can definitely say that Alexa ranking gives you some information about the traffic and ranks in the search engines. These websites are highly popular and deserve their place in the top.
Still, I wouldn’t concentrate too much on the Alexa ranking because
1.It doesn’t show traffic accurately
2.The rank can be easily manipulated (you can buy better rankings).
Instead, I recommend you to concentrate more important things in your Online Business like creating valuable content, SEO and others.
What do You Think about Alexa?
Have you used Alexa or other website ranking tools? Leave a comment below or join the discussion in Wealthy Affiliate.
Hi RKiuttu,
I read your piece Is Alexa Ranking Important with some interest and these are my reactions:
I like how you used the example from two of Kyle’s website to show how bogus Alexa ranking can be. Then you tied it in nicely with Jaaxy which could make people curious to check and maybe convert them into sales.
The fact that one can buy Alexa rankings would let you readers know how unreliable it is.
Last, but not the least, you’re telling people to create valuable content rather and use SEO and directing them to your articles is a clever tactic indeed.
Please continue to inform the blogosphere so that people don’t continue wasting their time and their hard-earned money.
Thank you for your comment Akoli. Yes, Jaaxy is very useful and fast tool to find right keywords which rank better in Google. Better rankings lead to more traffic and more traffic leads to more sales. Simple? 🙂
Valuable content is probably the most important thing because then people are willing to read your website more. They will recommend it to others. That leads to more credibility and authority which eventually leads to sales. Trust is very important in online business and valuable content builds trust powerfully.
I wish you all the best Akoli!
-Roope
Alexa is about the most useless metric I can think of for measuring your website’s authority. I don’t know anyone who has the Alexa toolbar installed on their computer and I don’t use it myself. Why anyone would pay attention to their Alexa ranking is beyond me.
I like your honest comment, Steve! 🙂 It’s interesting that I don’t neither know anyone who is using Alexa toolbar. There are better ways to use our time than to investigate Alexa’s rankings.
Thank you for the comment!
-Roope
Hi Roope:
Thank you for your article on Alexa. I agree with you in that Alexa is not worthy anyone’s time. I use Google Analytics. And I have used Jaaxy for the free 30 word searches, but right now, I cannot justify upgrading to premium due to the cost.
Another tool I have used and liked it is SERPLAB – I think it is easy and provides good useful information and it is free, but I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Thank you for the comment Steph.
Google Analytics is great and it’s incredible that it can be free. Jaaxy’s premium costs $19/month so it depends on what is your need and how far you are in the online business. But I would say that it can certainly save a lot of your time and time = money. In the long run, it can also pay off its price.
I haven’t used SERPLAB myself before but it seems to be interesting. I need to investigate and use it for a while know to it better. Thank you for the interesting tool!
I hope you success
-Roope
I did use Alexa very long time ago but have no impression of it anymore. It seems to me, Alexa Ranking does not carry much weight as anyone can pay for a higher Alexa Rank. This certainly is not acceptable to me. Thank you for your review is certainly helpful for anyone interested in pursuing a 100% legit program like Wealthy Affiliate.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Fred. As you said we shouldn’t give too much too much importance for the Alexa ranking. It can give some insights but it’s not very important in the Online Business.
Yes I agree that, Wealthy Affiliate is 100% legit and honest program.
I hope you all the best
-Roope