Alexa Rankings

[Maverick]

How does Alexa ranks the pages? Earlier it used to be somewhat based on the visitors who used to visit a site with Alexa Toolbar installed, is it same now, as I heard that they changed their algorithm and it is not entirely based on their Toolbar stats.

[Jeff]

It's a proprietary formula, but basically they get their data from the Alexa toolbar and any other statistical data they can mine. They don't really tell you more than this, otherwise I'm sure people would game the system.

Yes, they recently changed their formula because of what you said. Webmaster-type websites (like INForum) had higher Alexa rankings because a lot of visitors had the Alexa toolbar installled. They've changed how they calculated the rankings to remove this bias and the Alexa ranking fell for a lot of webmaster-type websites.

[Nomad]

Rightly said Jeff, but I read somewhere on digital point forums that it can be forged easily, don't know much about this but how true is it. Along with it, what significance does Alexa rankings have for a website?

[Jeff]

I'm not sure that it can be forged. I think when Alexa first started out it may have been easy to game, but by now they are pretty sophisticated when it comes to measuring traffic.

As for use, it's just another piece of data about a domain or website to take into consideration. It might give you an indication whether a domain has type in traffic. It might be useful to see if a website's traffic stats make sense or may be forged. It can be useful to compare websites within a particular niche to see how they rank in popularity.

However, it is just one out of many pieces of data that you should use, combined with experience, research and "gut feel."

[Nomad]

I know some advertisers (mostly the direct advertisers) do consider Alexa rankings as their criteria to set up an advertisement rate for a website/Blog . A better Alexa rank surely fetches a better rate.

[Jeff]

Yes, most sites won't disclose their traffic, so advertisers need to rely on something.

Compete.com and Quantcast.com also provide interesting information.

[Nomad]

Rightly said, But I still do not understand how Compete.com works. That is, Alexa starts recording traffic by itself but still do now understand how compete.com gives a rank to page. Any page with even a few page visits a day is ranked by Alexa but not by compete.

[Jeff]

Yes, there seems to be a bias towards larger websites (and also American websites) on Compete.

[nikko]

From what I understand it hasn't really changed, they are still using the information from users who have the toolbar. I have noticed that if you look at your bandwith stats it matches their graph which makes me think they are also now using other forms of information to generate their data.

[Postman]

It can be forged in the past by having the widget on your site. Alexa will give it priority over the other sites which don?t have any widget.

I don?t think that the same technique will work right now because Alexa has changed its algorithm now.