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?
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