Alexa Rank: Fact or Fiction

July 4th, 2007

The accuracy of Alexa rankings is always something I've wondered about.

Some of my clients have put great store by it.

After putting their SEO work on hold - "We like our rankings just fine the way they are" - two months later they start to see their Alexa rankings plummeting and are back on the telephone.

"I've seen our Alexa numbers are way down? What can we do about it?"

Of course, I'd have already seen a month ago by the traffic and the search engine referrals that urgent site promotion was called for. I always thought Alexa only provided the roughest ballpark figures.

It turns out the situation is even more dire than one would think. Alexa Rank can be wildly wrong - by a factor of ten.

But the same clients like the Alexa ranking system - it's as inherently easy to understand as a high school popularity contest. Am I more or less popular than my competitors? Am I in the top 200,000 websites in the world or not?

That should read "most popular in the English-speaking world" - Alexa doesn't matter anywhere else. There are a lot of very popular international websites with extremely low Alexa numbers.

In any case, here are the hard numbers from SEOlogs.com: Putting Alexa Rank to the Test - SEOlogs.com:

Site	Pageloads (per month)	Unique Visits (per month)	Alexa Rank	Site Type
swansea.info	4,193	1,517	1,093,097	local/ travel
ferrao.org	12,322	4,100	7,307,702	News Blog
labitacora.net	14,469	9,663	652,472	Blog
kottu.org	21,378	11,595	1,168,943	Blog
igrice.hr	59,097	22,482	391,457	Gaming
tolkienlibrary.com	61,701	25,615	384,627	Books
liberalavenger.com	56,453	27,987	701,743	News/ Politics blog
claysbamapage.net	65,559	39,846	685,256	Football
seologs.com	150,243	50,665	9,921	SEO/ SEM
pixelperfectdigital.com	256,571	74,608	125,565	Photography/ Design
versosperfectos.com	436,716	98,814	78,620	Music
militantplatypus.com	712,886	144,355	130,692	Photography/ Design
eclipse-plugins.2y.net	450,307	159,205	33,404	Programming
poea.gov.ph	639,658	202,965	50,306	Govt
emezeta.com	649,052	405,382	25,312	tech blog, espanol
osx-e.com	3,518,005	830,437	62,039	Mac
microsiervos.com	2,496,956	1,452,791	6,040	Computer science
blogadorn.com	13,403,525	1,713,931	52,704	Clip Art for Myspace
javimoya.com	18,075,839	7,848,084	2,098	youtube downloader

Nice work compiling these figures.

By Alec

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