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Having the Alexa rank of a website tells you the relative popularity of a site across the millions of sites, over the last 3 months. The sites are ranked in numerical order, with Alexa Rank of No. 1 being the most popular.
That’s Google by the way.
Using our Domain Age Checker and verifying with Wikipedia, we know that Alexa.com has been around since 1996.
This makes it one of the oldest proprietary methodology that provides a fairly reliable estimate of a site’s popularity!
Since traffic and engagement are said by Alexa to be estimated from the browsing behavior of people in their global panel, Alexa Rank is highly regarded by most as an important metric when benchmarking against their competitors.
Well, we all know what estimations are.
It’s an estimate.
Meaning to say, a site’s Alexa Rank is simply a sampling technique to guess the actual popularity of the site. And this would lead to a whole array of possible sampling errors.
For starters, common sampling errors that may skew data to varying levels of extent include Population Specification Error, Sample Frame Error and Selection Error.
Samples can be manipulated at the end of the day. Hence, it is strongly recommended that the Alexa Rank metric shouldn’t be the sole indicator of a website’s success.
The Alexa Extension for Chrome provides most of the features you may need. It is informative and free to use.
The features include:
By using Alexa’s free tool, you will become part of the Alexa Toolbar community. Your consent will be given to the installed toolbar to collect and contribute valuable web information while you surf the web (every single page that you have visited), how it’s used, what’s important and what isn’t. You will thus provide Alexa with the data it needs.
On the other hand, using our online rank checker includes an additional feature: Alexa’s Reach Rank.
It is a subset of the Alexa Rank, which narrows down to the number of users a site can potentially reach, taking page views out of the equation. Some may say that the Reach Rank is less manipulative, and more useful.
Similarly, the Reach Rank is also numerically ordered, with No. 1 having the highest reach on the Internet.
Yep, that’s Google again!
One of key sources of data is the browser extension you are using.
Although Alexa now uses a combination of numerous browser extensions and custom site scripts to collect better data, the browser extension was once the only way data was collected.
This led to serious inaccuracies, which are still prevalent with today’s Alexa data.
With this knowledge, many exploit it to their advantage. By generating fraudulent traffic (with the browser extension) to their sites, their Alexa Rank can be jacked up tremendously . This would later skew the sample into a grossly unfair representation of actual data and as mentioned earlier, rendered the metric highly irrelevant when considered alone.
This is also why achieving a “good” Alexa Rank will not suffice. Site owners must be wary of other 3rd party metrics which includes, but not limited to, Moz’s Domain Authority, Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs etc.
Worrying about your Alexa ranking is a complete waste of time. It generally improves as your traffic grows. In fact, if you are the site owner of the particular site you are checking on, Google Analytics is a far superior option and also free to use.
So… Don’t let a number get to you and your team. It isn’t worth fretting over.
Always remember to work on your core. That’s what matters.
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