Tag Archives: Alexa

Are some people really that uninformed?

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It’s amazing to me how many people will quote Alexa as the word of God or as if it has any relevancy in terms of actual factual data or any form of accuracy.

When dealing with any two websites it never fails someone mentions Alexa ratings.  They mention how this site is better than that site because it has a better Alexa rating.  I can quickly come back and that with actual server stats that show you a site with an Alexa rate of 2 million has significantly more traffic than one with an Alexa rating of 500,000.  How is that possible you ask?  BECAUSE ALEXA ISN’T ACCURATE!!!

Why is this even still being discussed?  How do people not know this already?  Seriously.  After so many years of people proving time and again this very thing, how is it that there are still some people out there who don’t get this?

Visiting Alexa is much like going to see a psychic and requesting a palm reading so you will know your future.  Sure it’s fun and maybe puts your mind at ease just a little but it doesn’t really mean anything said is true.

You really think there is some line on the palm of your hands that will tell someone some magical secret information about you?  LOL

Well there isn’t any information you will find at Alexa that is accurate either.

I own a lot of websites and I keep track of how much traffic each site gets each and every day.  I know my traffic stats going back for years and years.  I also know the Alexa ratings of my websites.  I can look at see that Alexa will report one site at 800k while another at 3.3 million, yet in reality the 3.3 million site might be getting as much traffic as my friend’s site who has an Alexa rating of 35k and the site with an 800k Alexa rating gets 3 visitors a day.

I remember reading a post one day about a guy bitching how his wife didn’t get more award nominations and how the whole system must be corrupt because his wife site has a great alexa ranking.  So totally that means she’s the #1 porn star of all time, right?  Or at least top 10, right?

Truthfully, his wife isn’t even in the top 100.  That’s not being mean.  That’s just being honest.  It’s not saying she isn’t pretty or that she isn’t a wonderfully nice person.  Who knows, I don’t know her but what I do know is, despite what he claims about his site’s Alexa ranking, it doesn’t make his wife popular or even remotely well known.  She’s not in the top 100, or even probably the top 200.   That is the reality.  Popularity of a porn star has nothing to do with Alexa and it never well.  Alexa is just some random number.  It’s like saying here, pick a card any card and whatever random number on that card appears is supposed to magically mean something.  It just doesn’t.

So please next time you want to make some argument about something, don’t bother even mentioning your sites Alexa ranking because it makes you look like not so bright when you try and convince people how great you are because your sites Alexa ranking.

 

The Truth About Alexa Exposed

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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.