Confused about Alexa
I’ve never really understood why Alexa rankings are used as a guide to how popular a website is. As they themselves say that their data “may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.” Yet everyone wants a really high Alexa rank.
Recently, Alexa changed the way that they gather data and arrive at the rank for a website. It used to be that you had to have the Alexa toolbar loaded for your visit to a site to count. But the ranks that were arrived at gave no indication of how many people were using the toolbar (as a percentage of total internet users) and gave no indication of how many sites were indexed – you might be ranked 544,232, but how do you know how good that is? If they only index 544,233 sites then it’s really bad. If, though, they index 54,423,200 then it’s pretty good. Relevance is what we’re talking about.
And that was a system that could be “gamed” quite effectively. I’ve got the Alexa toolbar loaded in Flock (it’s not available for Safari) and have managed to dramatically improve the Alexa ranking for all the sites that I maintain at home and at work just from my own visits. Being able to improve a site’s ranking by over 2,000,000 in less than 10 days from one person’s visits seems like there’s something wrong.
With the changes, though, they use the toolbar data backed up with “data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.” Helpfully, they don’t give an indication of what those sources are. This should mean that Alexa rankings will be more accurate and more relevant, but I’m not sure that it does. The changes were made in mid-April (see this blog entry from the Alexa site), and immediately a lot of people were upset because their ranking got worse (see comments to the same blog post). The rank for this site improved by about 50,000 at that time, but since then hasn’t changed at all. Given that its been about three weeks, that seems odd (the old ranking system used to change the ranks every three or four days).
What’s also odd is that the current rank doesn’t seem to tie-up with Alexa’s own figures. On the traffic details page for wolfshowl.com, they state that all but 0.4% of the traffic comes from UK, US, Australia, Canada or Indoensia. The individual ranks for these countries range from 20,306 for the UK to 224,386 for the US – yet the overall rank for the site is 364,952. How does that work? If it’s done on averages, then the ranking in the 0.4% that comes from other countries must be really, really bad because the average of the countries they list is 140,002. Whichever way it’s done, how can a site have a ranking 120,000 worse than the result you get if you add together the ranks of the two countries that make up over 86% of the total traffic?
I’ve always wondered about the relevance of Alexa and lamented its use a measure for advertising spend, but now I’m also starting to wonder about its ability to add up.
Update (20 May 08): after going up slightly (to 303,195) on the very day I wrote this post, the Alexa rank for The New Wolfs Howl has this evening completely disappeared. This could be a glitch with their system, or it could be as a result of the changes they’ve made. Only time will tell.
So how relevant is Alexa?
I’m using Flock as my browser at the moment; I moved over to it from Safari because the Mac browser wasn’t good at certain things – like the visual editor at Wordpress. There were also a number of other things that appealed about Flock:
- It’s based on the Mozilla engine, so pretty much anything that’s available for Firefox should work.
- It integrates with things like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr; all sites that you can’t live without.
- You can get the Alexa toolbar for it.
I’ve become rather obsessed with the Alexa toolbar, with Alexa rankings and with web stats in general. During the course of normal life, I’m responsible for quite a number of websites, whether here at home or at work. All of them are tracked by at least one stats package, sometimes more, whether it be Google Analytics, Sitemeter or Web Analyzer. Web stats seem to be the modern equivalent of alchemy, with all of the fantastic information that they can gather for you – even though most web stats are only inferred from certain hard data that is collected.
The one that confuses me, though, is Alexa. For instance, yesterday the Alexa ranking for The Wolf’s Howl @ BlogSpot was 9,246,837. Today, it’s 4,182,604. But what does that mean? I know the Alexa figures take a three month look at the site, so it hasn’t all happened overnight, but how good or bad is 4,182,604? It would seem to be obvious that there are 4,182,603 sites that have better rankings than me, but out of how many? If Alex indexes ten million sites, my ranking is just outside the top 40%. If Alexa indexes 100 million sites, it’s just inside the top 5%. I can see how far from the top number I am, but how far away am I in percentage terms?
And, as I understand it, Alexa only gathers information from people – like me – who have the Alexa Toolbar loaded (which is only available for certain browsers). So how much of the Internet browsing fraternity contributes to an Alexa ranking? I don’t know anyone else who has the Alexa Toolbar loaded – just like I don’t know anyone who’s got the Google Toolbar loaded (which is apparently used to determine Google PageRank). So, have they got their toolbar in 5% of browsers? 10%? 95%?
Without these two fairly important pieces of information, it’s impossible to put a relevance to an Alexa ranking. That being the case, why is Alexa given so much importance for rating the success of a site? Companies looking to place advertising on websites seem to look at two things – Google PageRank and Alexa Rank. Both are a complete mystery to how relevant they are, but the world seems to revolve around them.
So can anyone out there answer my two questions; how many sites do Alexa index and what percentage of total Internet users have their toolbar loaded?
Alexa for Firefox… but not
Saw this post on the Calacanis weblog (yes, I know, I read the Calacanis weblog. I can’t help it. It’s road-accident blogging; you just gotta stop and look) and thought “Yay! Now I can see what all the fuss is about with Alexa“.
Downloaded the toolbar, installed it, worked fine. Gives you a bunch of related links to sites you visit, gives you an Alexa ranking for the site, adds another search option. Bunch of good stuff.
Five minutes after installing it, Firefox tells me that its updated to version 2.0.0.5 and needs to restart. After restarting, it tells me that the Alexa plug-in is not compatible with this version of Firefox so will be disabled. Damn!
So, will it be another five year wait before it’s working again?
20/7 UPDATE: No, we don’t have to wait five years. Just check out this entry and follow the instructions, or go straight to this site to download the extension you need. I’ve tried it and it’s working fine on my system. Take the usual care, though, if you load it on to yours because it has the potential to break everything the next time something gets updated.
Wolfs Helpers
