Alexa Rank: Fact or Fiction

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:

Nice work compiling these figures.

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.