How Does Alexa Work?

Does anyone know how http://www.alexa.com works? It says it is powered by google. Does its rankings only come from when it is used, or when google.com is used? Im trying to figure out what is up with my ranking on it. I definetly never applied for a ranking through them.

Thanks,
-Josh

As quoted from their web, Alexa ...


If you want to know how their traffic rankings are determined, click here.

Gringo.

I have also been exploring this site , since posted, one of my sites even has a cache of the page.....my other sites that I keyed in are their with no photo..says photo coming soon...I am confused to say the list....but over 2million hits on the one with photo displayed....can someone give a more detailed report on this Alexa thing....

Alexa seems hard for people to understand at first. I caught a guy on eBay trying to sell a site that claimed to get 2,000,000 hits a month. He read the Alexa rating wrong. You'll understand in a minute. I always look at an alexa rating before I look at pagerank because they mean different things. I look at Alexa to access traffic levels, you can rarely determine traffic levels with Pagerank only just how important the site is to Google and others. You could have a pagerank of 7, but only get 3 unique hits a day. Plus who besides Google really understands there Pagerank Algorithm really? But I like both for there own reasons.

Alexa is really easy to understand once you get the hang of it. It probably the greatest traffic gauge on the internet for all websites. Your site will get a ranking once it crawls your site. You can't submit it really, well you can, but it will take you 45 minutes to find it on the Alexa site.

Ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4 mil sometimes. The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. 4,000,000 is for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic basically. You have to give it 3 months to give you an accurate rating. 1 is the site with the most traffic. A darn helluva lot of it at that.

For example, if you have a rating of say 300,000, which is not bad, you are getting about 14x the amount of traffic a 4,000,000 site gets. And that might not even be accurate. I have gauged a system to tell me what a sites traffic level is from its rating, I can look at sites now and tell you a really good estimate of hits per day. But I am not going to give out my research yet. It just takes a little research of sites on your own.

The power in the Alexa is your ability to tell if someone if lying about their traffic levels, if you are purchasing advertistment space on a website and you want to see if they are really getting the hits they say they are, gauging domains you could buy with traffic, giving a good map of where traffic is going on the internet, etc...

The flaw in Alexa is that it determines traffic blindly. Meaning that you can elevate your level by increasing traffic to your sites. Meaning that if you claim you site is getting 10,000 hits a day and if you are great, but that doesn't determine what it will get after you stop advertising. Its an over time thing. The rating will eventually go back up [which is lower traffic levels again] once the traffic tapers off but its takes several weeks.
Best thing to do is look at your site traffic stats and then look at your Alexa rating. Then watch the rating a couple of times a week to see if any changes have occurred. I lost 600,000 in rating points in one week from new search engine traffic. So the longer your site has been monitored by Alexa the better, it gives more of an accurate level of reporting. I also use Alexa to watch my rating over a month period, between Google Dances. What my advertising has done for my site, etc... I am sure you can think of the possiblities.

Alexa also monitors the Average Pages Viewed by one visitor over a day, week, or month. The more pages viewed the more interested you visitors might be about the information on your site. If you get 1.0 as your Average Pages Viewed score, then one person only looks at one pages on average of different time periods. Get a score of 7, most of the time it means 7 pages viewed per visitor.

Alexa also accesses reach per million of users. This rating is tricky to understand as well, took me a bit to put it all into explainable numbers not just come numbers. Yahoo has a reach per million internet users of 28% which means for every 1,000,000 million visitors, they get 280,000 of that traffic. So if you have a traffic level of 20 then that means for every million people 20 visit your site.

Check out Alexa and the Archive at www.alexa.com

Whoa, that was long. Probably my longest post yet. Hope that helps anyone that doesn't understand the rating thing. Enjoy! Feel free to response to anything I said.
Well its late and I am off!

Ben P

Alexa collect data from the users Alexa browser Bar.

I'm not too sure about Alexa. We have a site that does well with Google and Yahoo and it got 1 hit from Alexa yesterday. For it's search term, it is listed #3 on Alexa. Alexa's rank for this site is right over 500k. Alexa's traffic guestimate is way off....as in another galaxy. If Alexa can't get the info right on my site, which has been around since 1996 why would I trust it for other sites. And if I'm listed #3 for a popular search term and only got 1 hit from Alexa, why should I worry about it for now?

On Alexa.com is states "results are only accurate if you are in the top 100k", and the lower traffic ranking you get, the more accurate your score is.

Alexa tool bar is regarded as spyware, at least by spybot!

When I installed the Alexa Toolbar I had some problems with pop-ups and other stuff, and SpyBot told me it was spyware, I deleted it, pop-ups were gone. Although it may have also been another program giving me pop-ups, but I think it was Alexa!

Here's the first paragraph that greets you when you choose to install Alexa:

Note: Alexa collects and stores information about the web pages you view, the data you enter in online forms and search fields while using the Alexa browser companion software, and, with versions 5.0 and higher of the browser companion software, the products you purchase online. Although Alexa does not attempt to analyze web usage data to determine the identity of any Alexa user, some information collected by the software is personally identifiable. Alexa aggregates and analyzes the information it collects to improve its service and to prepare reports about aggregate web usage and shopping habits.


no thank you

I did see that it does back links better than on google, on google it seems that you only getto see the links into your site if you are a PR4 or more, and even then you only get to see the links from sites which are also PR4 or more.

On Alexa, as far as I can tell you get to see all sites that link into your site regardless of your PR.. (and theirs...)

I don't know how accurate this is, or how often it's updating. i.e. if you add a link, I don't know then it will be seen, but it gives you a better idea of what links link to you...

Nice

I too got many popups from the alexa toolbar. Thats why i took it out and replaced it with the google toolbar. The google one is nice though... Ahhh Pagerank! I'm starting to feel like alexa is a pointless site, because ive gotten crawled by them a few times, but have only gotten 3 hits from them in about a year. For my site it says it doesnt have a traffic report. But a buddy's site has a report, and he gets alot less traffic than i do. How is this?

-Josh

As far as I understood the traffic rating. The rating was dependent on the amount of people that visited your site with the Alexa toolbar, if they don't have the toolbar, it will not be counted in the rankings. Like for example say your porn site gets good traffic but you have a crappy rating is in alexa, porn viewers don't care about alexa toolbars so will not view your site with one.
Its measured on readings from the toolbars, so alot of times it could be wrong, thats why you keep stats on your page to determine this.
I use it for verification purposes. Just my interpretation of this.

Ben

Darrin,

Just an observation but I see your site: google-dance.com as having a site rank of 5,142.
To give a traffic estimate how this site traffic level is dependent on Alexa toolbars: 24,000-34,000 hits a day from Alexa toolbars visitors, most likely coming from Google and elsewhere. Awesome rating!

I could be wrong, but its just a guess. Its very tricky. Maybe Darrin you could let us know, for educational purposes.

Enjoy!

Ben

I still don't really see how this is useful, except maybe as a not so accurate measure of traffic?

What's the point? I don't get it!