I don’t think there is any rocket science. If someone wants to boost his alexa rank, he must increase his technology oriented visitors base like webmasters, technology geeks etc. Because these are the people who certainly have the alexa toolbar installed.

This blog’s Alexa is 4700 now. I think you have 10-30K visitors daily. But i know a lot of websites that have 200-300k visitors and have only 5000-7000 Alexa.

Alexa.com should put a disclaimer on its website warning people that their data is `For Amusement / Entertainment Use Only as Alexa rankings CAN be easily manipulated.

Can anybody of you, professionals, tell me exactly how Alexa calculates the TOTAL number of Internet users?

Any kind of official info? or some trustworthy description of their algorithm?

Do they rely only on their Toolbar? Or count any other stat sources?

Thanks a lot in advance!

I don’t think there is any rocket science. If someone wants to boost his alexa rank, he must increase his technology oriented visitors base like webmasters, technology geeks etc. Because these are the people who certainly have the alexa toolbar installed….

I guess !!!

Even my Google Analytic’s & Alexa Traffic don’t match anymore

Do we need a refresher course on how Alexa Rank data is calculated?

Are you losing money when your site’s Alexa Rank declines for a week or two?

Let’s return our focus back to content and not obsess over stats and analytics.

Source Blogger

I work on this website for a client who DOES take notice of alexa.

Not good when it comes to a weekly report.

Any ideas.

My other, much smaller website with way less traffic (System 7 Today) is somehow in the 200,000s, is supposedly getting 99.9% of traffic from South Korea, and is the 3,399th most popular website in that country.

I’m now completely done with Alexa.

I have no idea lol…

First of all, I believe you are completing misinterpreting the Alexa REACH stats. Their REACH stat is a percent of all Internet users that the site is being viewed by. So theoretically, if Alexa was a truly accurate and unbiased, representative random sample of all Internet users worldwide, then if you take the percent that they say your site ranks and multiply times the total number of Internet users worldwide you would get a number which equals your site traffic.

So there are what, 190 million Internet users? 300 million? Who knows? It’s a moving target and no one knows the exact answer. The point is, whatever the number is, it’s huge and your monthly uniques are going to represent a very teeny tiny percentage of total users. So, allowing for some error, it is entirely possible that all of the comparisons you disagree with on Alexa are in fact accurate. Remember you are looking at a comparison of relative PERCENTS ot total Internet users, not the actual user counts that Compete shows. It is very difficult to move the needle when you are measuring a what your traffic represents as a percent of all users. All but the top 100 sites will look very small on this measure.

And there is no possible way you can compare a percentage ranking from Alexa with estimated visitor counts from Compete without doing some further math like I have described.

The second relevant point I would like to make here is no two web analytics reporting systems EVER agree. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. So forget about getting agreement. You never will. The reason is because you do not know all the relevant details about which traffic was counted and which wasn’t. Particularly session length is the one variable which can totally throw off comparisons for unique visitors. I say 30 minutes, you say 20 minutes, somebody else says 15 minutes, another 60 minutes, and 90% of analytics package users leave the setting at whatever the default setting is for their package and the setting varies from analytics program to analytics program.

Another obvious but not so obvious factor is whether the stats throw out visits from robots or include them. And the list goes on and on.

There will never be a defacto standard that ever totally agrees with your web logs. We might get some agreement strictly for convenience sake that this analytics or that analytics is the current benchmark for comparing sites, but there will never be an unambiguous absolute truth here. You will always be making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It’s just an estimate.

Today you are railing against Alexa. In the future, you will very likely not be happy with Compete, or Google, or Hitbox or you-name-it.

Their methodologies are also different. Not every pageranking site is the same. Everyone have different experience they have been through and learn the years of experience. Same theory like page rank site. They are still in the works and they aim for improvement not perfection. As the saying goes “No one is perfect” same thing, same theory applies to the mathematical problem solving that involves page rank. That is why their methodologies is not an easy task to develop.

Only the owner of the website who works on the ranking architectures, methodologies, optimization and allocation knows how it works but it is not yet perfected in anyway. It might take years for it to come into fruition. So bear with them.

Since there is no scientific track record to prove that claim up so you can’t be so quick to judge them. It is a learning process so we also continue to evolve. Same goes with the website. Till then take care.

if theres anyone who could help me see something i’m missing please write!

our site is
http://www.ipodrefresh.com

More interestingly, he hinted at Alexa evolving to become a different kind of company in the coming weeks. He asked a lot of questions about analytics and reporting needs.

Just thought I would share!

Here in the UK vista is becoming more and more popular which means sites that attract UK visitors will drop in the Alexa rankings.
Other countries, where vista isn’t as popular may still have the toolbar installed which will mean their rankings are not effected.

A perfect example of this is a popular UK Business Forum. it’s Alexa rankings are in a steady decline, and yet everything else says it is as busy as ever, another thing Alexa highlights is the growing percentage in overseas visitors.

This could be caused by 2 things;
1. It is getting more overseas visitors
2. UK visitors have Vista, oversees visitors don’t

I’m more inclined to think 2 is more accurate.

Go figure. Good post Daniel.

Compete shows more realistic data than Alexa, but is also useless if you are interested in non-English or maybe even non US based sites.

I guess Google trends for websites will be the authority in the near future when it comes to traffic evaluations. With Google Analytics, Google Toolbar, Google Search and other services they have so many data sources that they should be able to draw a realistic picture.

Same shit is on my blog, my friend blog gets less then half then traffic of mine but he is like in 40k in alexa and me still crapping in the 80k. I think the new restructuring of the ranking algorithm is totally worthless.

The old one used to give better results.

So a simple explanation for the lack of rank compared to other sites would be the other sites get more traffic from individuals that have Alexa’s tool-bar installed.

It is a terrible ranking system, but I believe that’s the explanation for it. It definitely needs to improve.

I think its about time advertisers smarten up and stop checking the Alexa rank. Or maybe its just good for people with low traffic. 😉

Now my rankings have improved since the change, however i know for sure that i do not get anywhere near as much traffic as this site does so why should my site have just over double the rank of yours.

It seems very silly and inaccurate, i am not sure how they even measure or calculate the results anymore.

To be honest they would probably get more accuracy by picking sites from a hat.

FYI, you’ve got a typo in your title—it’s “becoming,” not “becomeing.”