No matter what the experts may say about the extreme inaccuracies in the Alexa reported statistics, the one thing I think most people will agree is that at the very least Alexa data is fun to look at. It’s fun to see who they are saying is most popular. Last week Twitter was #11, this week #10, Facebook is #2 and this same time last year, where was it? Has it really gotten THAT famous in just one year’s time?
But as fan as it may be to gawk at the facts and figures they present to us, we can’t help but at least think about those experts who claim the data given at Alexa is so unreliable, that looking at their “top lists” are pointless since the information they use to make them is completely false. So we know more know if Site A is more popular than Site B, than we did before looking at Alexa. They claim simply put that Alexa is not in any way shape or form reliable. Not only that, but it is flat out false.
If you search “Alexa is a joke“, you’ll find over 1.6 million results in Google. But colorful commentary aside, let’s break it down to simplistic terms.
If you have two websites, one ranks 100, the other ranks 200. The site who ranks 100 should, in theory have more traffic than the site that ranks 200. Right?
Well, it should be right but the reality of the situation is, it isn’t correct. They base their statistics on a sampling of traffic from those who use their toolbar and as such they have no real way to know how many visitors actually visit site 1 or site 2, they can only guesstimate based off of a small sampling of data, then they guesstimate on the rest and what happens when you guess?
You guessed it …. you are just as likely to be wrong as you are to be right.
But so far it’s just been idle chatter and speculation. I wanted to actually put Alexa to the test, a real test.
I was starting a little project with a friend of mine, a membership site. I registered a domain name and setup Elevated X on it to process the movies on it. This site has no traffic, no promotion, heck it didn’t even have a website on it. I put up a single page, with one graphic – no SEO to it. The site itself got 0 visitors other than myself and my partner in the last 60 days. Zero.
The site has a google page rank of 0/10, which is as it should be there is no SEO to the site at all, no back links, nothing.
So how does Alexa see this site?
Alexa Traffic Rank: 1,182,852
SERIOUSLY????????????????????
How does this happen?
Let me explain why this is a problem.
I have a porn star website that has been up for about 9 years.
This site gets about 800 unique visitors per day. This site is a PR3 website and has thousands of backlinks.
The Alexa Traffic Rank for that website is 3,269,433
I have another porn star website that has been up about 2 years. The site gets about 600 to 700 unique visitors per day. The site is a PR2 website and also has a few thousand back links.
The Alexa Traffic Rank for that website : 1,503,388.
So the point of all of this is what?
Stop bragging about your Alexa ranking because in the end it really means nothing more than saying your BlaBlaBleeBla Ranking is —-. Both mean nothing.