Alexa is an Amazon owned company that is famous for its public rankings service through alexa.com. The website promotional guides often make great efforts to improve Alexa's ranking because the highest position often has high profits. As a new webmaster, you need to understand some very important points about Alexa's service. This article explains how the information collected by Alexa means, and then explains why it needs to be taken care of or not.
There are three issues with Alexa's reports, reach, page views, and general rank. Your access will return to the percentage of all web users visiting your website. Alexa can reach this number as "millions of users". For example, if Alexa is an access value, it means that an average of one million web surfers are visiting your site. Page views simply measure the average number of pages a surfer looks at when you're on your site. Sites with a lot of content and targeted visitors generate more pageviews. General Alexa ranges from a combination of access and page views, so the higher both are lower, the site's ranking will be; for Alexa, a smaller ranking represents the major site. Alexa averages these numbers for each day, week, and three months, and the total change over a three-month period. So how does Alexa collect these data?
Alexa collects statistics on visitors and page views every day on the web. In fact, there is no data for all sites. You see, data collection is done via web surfers who have downloaded and installed the Alexa toolbar for their Internet Explorer browser. When a user visits and searches for a site, the toolbar sends this information to Alexa's servers. For webmasters, this means that you only visit web pages that actually collect data for users who decide to install the toolbar. In addition, since only a fairly small group of all Internet surfing users use the toolbar, ranking is a statistical average, which is not necessarily a real signal of the quality and number of site readers. In fact, the number is really inaccurate on sites with few visitors, and Alexa admits that this is true in places that are not in the highest 100,000.
To make things worse, the toolbar is only available in Internet Explorer. Of course, IE is the browser of the majority of Internet users, and the data show that it is approx. Use 83% (onestat.com). This is no problem if the audience is more likely to be in 17% of fans, so those who prefer Firefox, Safari, Opera, or other alternative browsers. For example, slashdot.org is a technology news site whose audience is known to be very anti-Microsoft; The slogan of Slashdot is "News for women who is important." One expects most users to use browsers other than IE, and have recently announced that 65% of Slashdot readers use a browser other than IE. From this article (July 12, 2006) Slashdot ranked 176, reaching 5450 million online fans. Slashdot is about to use a so-called "Slashdot effect" when a story is linked to a site on the front page, so it gets so many visitors that servers often can not handle sudden traffic growth. In other words, I would expect Alexa's rank to underestimate the real rank of Slashdot.
From a statistical point of view Alexa's rank can not be regarded as an unbiased statistical measure. Alexa's sample of people used to collect data is not a random selection, but rather Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer users, as well as those who are willing to install the toolbar and send information about their browsing behavior to Alexa. If the audience is similar to Slashdot, do not expect accurate results. The same is true if the audience includes people who are pro-privacy and never install a toolkit that calls the big business on their way to browsing behavior.
So, if you really aim for accuracy on your site's user and page views, it's better for analytics software, such as Google Analytics, instead of Alexa. However, many advertisers rank Alexa as neutral third party estimates for the site's popularity; they will consult with Alex to determine how much ad slot is worth for your site. This is why many webmasters display Alexa's rank on the first page. If you are at the top of Alexa's ranking, you must be able to benefit; if you are not then you probably will not lose too much sleep on it. Focus on adding fresh content to your site; So you can bring more traffic to your site through the big search engines and keep your visitors alive.