I don't really get Alexa traffic rankings. I keep getting more and more visitors to my blog ... yet my Alexa ranking keeps plummeting. It's been nose diving for the past few months now. Not that I'm stat-obsessed with this blog (I totally am) ... I just like understanding how and why things are happening. For example, my Google PR went up to a 4, and back down to a zero. I understand why that happened. But I don't understand this.
And yeah, I've gone and read how Alexa rankings are calculated ... but it still doesn't make any sense. Given the steady increase in readership, my Alexa ranking should be getting better. At least, logically speaking it should. What gives?
Also something that bothers me about Alexa, why does my blog information say that this website is based in India? Is it where Google is registered? Since this Blogger and Gmail (the e-mail address that is attached to this website) is owned by Google? I've tried to edit the information, but apparently I can't. I don't even know how that info got there in the first place.
Labels: blog
Hi Krystal.
You can edit that India information here: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/contact_info?url=krystalatwork.blogspot.com
The traffic rank is supposed to go down I believe. The lower the better. Personal finance blog readers don't generally have the alexa toolbar installed compared to say someone who reads digg every day. Alexa data is only good for comparing sites in the same vertical.
After doing a little more research, this seems to be a trend across the board. Andy Beard has a great write up here:
http://andybeard.eu/2008/03/alexa-changes.html
Hope that answers some of your questions. :)
Without reading Andy's post, I'll give you my take on it.
Basically, your Alexa ranking is based on how many people visit your blog that have the Alexa toolbar installed.
And how many people do you know that have it installed? Usually it is just those that also care about their Alexa ranking.
It used to be that Alexa was built into Internet Explorer, and so it tracked millions of people's habits, but that is no longer so. I believe they took it out due to privacy concerns... the average user did not realize that their surfing was being tracked.
So an Alexa ranking is now a unrepresentative sampling of where people who purposely install the toolbar tend to surf.
As for why the numbers are likely going down... that's simple. From Alexa's own website when you look at the IE toolbar:
The toolbar currently does not work with Windows Vista.
Vista was released 1 1/2 years ago!!! And before it was released, it was available to software developers so they could prepare. Any software not yet supporting Windows Vista deserves to die!
I'm not being a Vista fanboy here... I'm just being realistic. If 90% of new computers sold in the past year and a half came with Vista, then you'd better support it!
Your question did make me return to their site and install the toolbar for Firefox. I hadn't done so until now, and if memory serves me right, it was because until just recently, it did not support 64bit operating systems!
It seems to me that Alexa's service was already losing value since it was unrepresentative, but now their own lack of action is likely to permanently kill it.
Now I'll go read Andy's post.
Yes, my Alexa ranking is plummeting as well-- however I only note Alexa ranking these days and never take it personally.
Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. It is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. Alexa toolbar is an application developed by Alexa Internet. Its primary use is to measure website statistics. This toolbar collects as well as gives some valuable information. Once you install it, the Alexa toolbar monitors all your surfing and collects information about what domains you visit. They use this data to rank web sites. The traffic rank they assign to websites is based on 3 months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of other users and is a combined measure of page views and users. Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.