The importance of Alexa rank to your website

What is the importance of Alexa ranking to your website or blog? Is the ranking system reliable? According to Alexa’s “Gathering Web Usage information, it utilizes web usage information coming from the community of Alexa Toolbar users. This means that a website’s Alexa Ranking depends on the traffic generated from visitors who have installed Alexa Toolbar in their internet browsers. This also means that your regular visitors who don’t have the toolbar will not contribute to your ranking. Alexa ranking is based on the three month traffic rank trend of a website. This trend is calculated according to the following:

1. Reach – percent of global internet users who visited a website

2. Pageviews – percent of global pageviews on a website

3. Pageviews/user – daily pageviews per user

4. Bounce rate – the percentage of visits to a website that consist of a single page turn

5. Time on site – daily time on site

6. Search percentage – the percentage of visits to a site that came from a search engine

According to Alexa, its toolbar has already gained over 10 million downloads worldwide. However, many webmasters and SEO experts still claim that their ranking system is biased considering that there are still many internet surfers who don’t use their toolbar. Moreover, they also claim that the ranking can be manipulated. One way to manipulate it is to install the Alexa toolbar in several PCs and visiting a site frequently while regularly changing IP addresses.

But despite of those issues that may deem Alexa ranking as a not so reliable popularity system, Alexa (an Amazon company) is still enjoying its worldwide recognition. In fact, when I searched Google this time for the keyword “website ranking”, it was Alexa who is in the top of the search results.

As contrast to Google ranking, the lower the site’s numbers in Alexa ranking, the higher the ranking it has. As of this post, the no.1 website according to Alexa is Google, followed by Facebook, then by Yahoo and Youtube. For blogs and websites, having a high Alexa ranking is still important for recognition and monetization purposes. Many website ranking sites today are still using Alexa ranking as one of their formulas in getting a website’s overall popularity. This is combined with Google Pagerank, numbers of subscribers and other rankings such as Technorati authorities in the case of weblogs. 

Other than the recognition and ranking benefits that we can get for having a high Alexa rank (usually 100 thousand to 1), this can also help us expand our online income opportunities. High Alexa rank may imply high traffic and may attract advertisers on our sites. A high Alexa ranking is also usually a requirement for some affiliate marketing sites in their membership acceptance. Thus, if you have a high rank, you will have a bigger chance to be approved and participate in their online revenue generating activities. Websites that have lower ranks are usually rejected.

As a conclusion, although a million Alexa toolbar users can’t really give us exact ranking on the popularity of every blogs or websites, the information it provides us can give us an idea how a website or blog ranks according to the traffic it receives. If some webmasters are using unethical tactics to increase their Alexarank, they need to do that consistently and expensively. Otherwise, their ranking will suddenly be backed to its original rank. This is why Alexa ranks a site in a three month average – to measure consistent and regular traffic. Thus, Alexa rank is important to blogs and websites because it gives recognition, increase monetization and provides important information that will help us make our blogs or websites do more.

You can download Alexa toolbar by following this link.

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