How installing Alexa affects your results!

I just noticed this very graphic example of how becoming an Alexa toolbar user and aficionado will almost automatically give you the results you want.

Since my site sells art materials, I pay a lot of attention to every other site that sells art materials.

Now here's one where the owner of the site suddenly installed the Alexa toolbar, and you can ever tell exactly when he did it:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?...pliesonline.com

This is a pretty classic example of how one person's activity, all by his lonesome, can completely bias Alexa.

Note that he visits Alexa and leaves a comment on 7/15. Immediately, he begins using the toolbar, and his rankings jump up in the charts, beginning with the first Alexa update after that day. Note the big plunge on Labor Day weekend. He probably took one last family trip before the cold Minnesota winter sets in? You can even see that there were two big dips in activity exactly around Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, so we know he went to schul.

Moral of the story -- don't use the Alexa Toolbar if you want meaningful results. Don't believe anybody who tries to sell you an ad based on Alexa results.

Now, just for a little amusement, will everybody who does have the Alexa toolbar installed please go visit this site:

www.artsuppliesonline.com

I do know the guy. Let's give him some excitement for a few days. I'll have a good laugh with him next time I see him at a trade show.

This is why I do not use Alexa's toolbar myself. I at least want meaningful data on my own site.

Howard Metzenberg
Highland Park, IL

I would not put one ounce of faith in alexa rankings - I think they are a ton of crap.

I'd have to agree 110%. Alexa is bunk. Since the majority of the Internet users don't use Alexa, the majority of Alexa data is worthless.

To funny.

Their numbers are not bunk or wrong.

They count the people that volunteer to be counted. How is this any different than your Television ratings? In fact Alexa uses a much larger statistical group for their ratings than Neilson does for figuring out which tv show is the highest rated.

That type of study is good enough for the media, for everybody I have ever met to take at face value - and more importantly, its good enough for advertisers to use to make millions of dollars worth of decisions on. Which is where Alexa comes into play more and more today, its where advertisers turn for some info on where to invest advertising money.

Is that wrong? Not in the least - would you rather that they just throw all the taken domain names in the world into a hat, and randomly pull names?

It is the only decent sized source of rankings out there - and at least in my field and most fields I have noticed, they do rank the sites in a pretty close order to the what I would guess to be the real rankings if we compared log files.

Actually, yes they are both bunk and wrong. We are dealing with numbers here, so it's rather easy equation.

If a site has 5,000+ uniques a day, and 18,000+ pages served, it is in fact getting more traffic than a site which gets 400 uniques per day, and less than 2,000 pageviews. It's simple numbers. No mystery to it.

And when Alexa gives the site with less traffic a higher traffic ranking, that makes Alexa wrong and incorrect.

If you come from some place where 200 is greater than 2,000, please send me one of your calculators. I'd love to do my taxes with it.





Many sad and desperate webmaster who install the toolbar would wish this to be true, but serious web professionals know that even one user with the toolbar installed can greatly skew rankings, and I've yet to me a professional who would put out green based on Alexa rankings.

We professionals tend to do the simple thing - ask the advertiser for his webstats. Webstats=accurate; Alexa=not.

No doubt... Alexa is a *very* generalized traffic gauge. The higher the traffic rank in Alexa, the more accurate it will be (because of the numbers game). I wouldn't trust it at all for anything not in the top 1,000 sites.

But even then it can be wildly skewed since not every user has it installed, and it's only available for IE for Windows. As an example, look at Apple computer's stats... as of right now, ranked 170, but I'm sure it's MUCH higher because the majority of their traffic is from Macintosh users (which there is no Alexa toolbar even available for). If you look at their chart, look how they popped up mid-October... because guess what? They released iTunes for Windows... overall, they probably aren't getting *that* much more traffic, but they are getting more Windows users to download iTunes.

Aside from skewing based on platform, another way it can be skewed is the type of site... I would guess search engine optimization sites have a better Alexa rating because a higher percentage of their users have the Alexa toolbar installed. A good example of this is seochat.com compared to mysimon.com... according to Alexa, seochat.com gets 4 times more traffic than mysimon.com... which I find a little hard to believe.

- Shawn

Alexa is a useful tool if you know how to use it.

First of all, as many have already mentioned, installing the Alexa toolbar on your own machine will improve your results.

It also is highly skewed towards technology or internet related sites, since visitors to these type of sites tend to be the type of people that would install something like this.

However, it still can be a useful gauge of traffic when used in combination with other variables.

I use the Alexa toolbar when evaluating whether or not to buy a website. If the seller claims to have 100,000 visitors a day, yet his Alexa rank is 3,000,000 I know something is wrong.

One feature of the Alexa toolbar I use all the time is the list of related links. I've found lots of great sites from that.

Yeah, that's what I mostly use it for too... The related links.

I just have to look at how my page has gone from around 2 million to around 300,000 in what can be considered quite a short time considering the page.

But I think as time passes, Alexa will someday be more useful...

lots of spyware in the alexa tool bar and i also dont belive the tool bar results that i got... when i had the toolbar before it was around 49,000 when i got less trafic and well i un-installed the toolbar, it is now 51,000 when i get more trafic

What kind of spyware? I know Ad-aware identifies Alexa as spyware, but what else comes from it?

I have not installed Alexa yet because of fear of them installing Spyware on my computer. Can anyone tell me what exactly they install? And how easy or hard is it to unstall it once it has been installed?

Alexa installs what shows up as spyware/adware under any adware buster software.

Everyone is this dialogue is correct.
It is a great tool if you use it properly.
But it also has the potential to be your worse nightmare, but I really doubt it...

Alexa is spyware, but in sort of a good way.
It watches everything you surf, so that it can provide you suggestions of other sites in the toolbar.

The downside is that all data is delivered to Amazon.com so that they can follow everyone.
And if they decide to partner with other big guys they'll make a buck there too...
So yes big brother is watching.
And the real downside to this is that when you sign up you agree to let them spy on you and give away all details...
But what is all details?

Well if you have sites where the user/pass is in the url...
Then you just gave them access to your protected areas.
The way around this is to always access protected areas through https:// instead of http://
This shuts Alexa down as you surf...
You can also use this same technique if you don't want alexa to pickup urls not ready for the public.

I use Alexa ALL THE TIME.
In the beginning I was a little scared to use this tool...
It has been one of the best tools in alerting me to new competition.
The funny thing is this, when new competition starts to explore seo, Alexa is the second place they turn to...
So then you know, lookout here they come...

The ranking stuff is neat, but you can't put to much weight on this...
It only measures the data of the people who have the toolbar or some other version of Alexa installed...
In fact you may have Alexa on your computer now, you just don't know it...
And most of the people that have the toolbar are guys like you and me...

Try it out...
If you don't like Alexa then download the FREE AdWare remover from:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com
You should always have this tool anyway, because your computer gets slammed everyday with spyware/adware.
This will remove completely remove Alexa.

But I would keep an open mind.
There are so many good uses to using this tool that it out weighs the bad.
And I don't keep anything on my computer, that would harm me anyway...

Good post - KidGeek - I appreciate your open mind and your listing of pros and cons. I'm perfectly happy with spybot S&D removing all the stray Alexa-toolbar stuff, but I'm sure lavasoftusa's adaware can do the job properly too (there are many recommendations ). Thanks for your comments and info.

I totally disagree with Egol... Alexa is two tons of crap (maybe even more).

Say what you want in Alexa's favor, but Alexa is a useless tool used to b.s. the uninformed. Don't waste your time. Focus on the search engines that bring you traffic and customers: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask(J).

The difference between Alexa and Neilsen ratings is that Neilsen is not random. They choose the families they ask to have equipment installed, trying to keep a fair cross section of viewers. They have demographic statistics, and if your family is not a demographic they need, they won't ask you to have equipment installed, even if you were to volunteer.

Perfect? No, but much better than random results would be.

Alexa, on the other hand, is biased toward people with an interest in the ranking of their website, that is, webmasters and SEOs. There are far fewer everyday users on Alexa. That's why their numbers mean so little and are easily skewed.