Before Alexa’s recent change, people complained their ranking numbers were meaningless. By counting the number of people who visited a site using the Alexa toolbar, they came up with a number. The fact that the only users who installed the toolbar tended to be webmasters was besides the point.
Now Alexa has changed their algorithm, making it worse than useless. I’m surprised my site doesn’t record a negative score seeing how off base their estimates are. I own 3 websites that get exactly the same visitors nightly. Thanks to Entrecard, I know who visited and the time of day. Without fail, my two smaller sites get the same 50 visitors daily. Turnipofpower.com, my main site, also gets these same 50 visitors. In addition, it gets about 300 more Entrecard visitors, and about 200-300 organic visitors a day. That’s 500-700 visitors day in and day out.
So, if I asked you what a graph of my traffic would look like, you would expect two of my sites to have perfectly matched graphs, and then a third line representing turnipofpower.com way above those other two sites.
Graph showing unique vistors at Turnipofpower.com over the last month.
Graph showing 2 websites that get only 50 uniques a day vs. Turnipofpower.com that gets 450-650 uniques most days. Notice the other 2 sites overlap precisely?
So, why does Alexa suck *ss to put it bluntly? My other two blogs are blah blah blogspam blogs. Websites you wouldn’t read twice if you landed there by accident. Turnipofpower.com, on the other hand, is a marketing blog that made it into the top 50k in Alexa rankings under the old system. I understand Alexa penalizing marketing blogs to make up for the fact only marketing types use their toolbar, but this is ridiculous. To add insult to injury, a friend of mine runs a top baseball site with a daily Alexa rank below 30k. Alexa reports 29.6% of his traffic comes from Nigeria. Uh, sorry Alexa, I checked his server logs, that’s not even close.
Why does it matter? It matters because established advertising companies rate sites based upon an antiquated Alexa score. Often they reject a site unless you are below 250k, 100k, or even 50k. I can’t wait until Google Trends for Websites becomes the new standard. If Alexa falsifies traffic data to penalize marketers, will Google falsify traffic data to penalize Pay-Per-Posters?
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38 users commented in " Alexa: The Random Number Generator "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback **********From what I understand, Nigeria is a hotbed for baseball. And just hot.
Did I say “top” baseball site? I meant “over rated”.
For some weird reasons, I got under 100,000k in ranking a few days ago
I don’t think my traffic is a lot (around 800-1000 a day) and the bounce rate is around 80%, so I don’t know how they can come up with that number
Alexa sure is weird.. but I shouldn’t complain though, should I? O_o
I have no idea what Alexa is using for figuring numbers, but as long as mine look good to the advertisers
As for Google, well Google will do what Google WANTS to do. It’s the importance the rest of the world puts on those numbers that will have the most impact.
I have had PR0 for the last year. I will probably always have PR0. I am living with that. My REAL stats show I have a modest amount of traffic and THOSE are the numbers that matter most to me.
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Turnip you have definitely hit a hot button with me. This hot button is hotter than baseball in Nigeria. Alexa numbers have absolutely no relation with reality.
I get a lot of traffic to my web site that is not part of the marketing world. During the spring my traffic numbers spike with page views over 100,000 per month. My visitor count reaches 42,000 during a month. My Alexa scores at that time were getting worse.
This makes me wonder why on earth marketing people put so much credence on the Alexa scores. But, then again, there are a lot of things marketing people do that I don’t understand.
Google trends may bring more light to traffic numbers, but Google has it own problems.
I was close to 100K in the old Alexa system and I’m over 150K in the new system, and getting worse.
The I get around 800+ visitors a day now, but only about 200 visitors when they used the old system. Go figure.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks that the Alexa change is crap. But, it is what it is. Many people still use it as a gauge of how good a site is doing so I think many will still have to pay attention to this rating.
I can’t complain at all because Alexa has been very good to me. My blog is only 4 months old and I got the toolbar after about a month when Alexa was already under the new system so I can’t compare. My blog has nothing to do with marketing. I started at 5 mil, went immediately to 500,000 and almost every week move up to where I am at about 160,000. I get on average 150-200 visitors a day, about 1/2 from entrecard but lately a big percent from google search. Still no google page rank though.
My blogs 3 month average is like 350k because its barely been around that long. But at one point i was ranked like 68k, i was pretty shocked but aware this couldnt be accurate. I get like no traffic from Nigeria… unfortunately
The other funny thing about turnipofpower.com traffic is that it shares the same upperlevel domain as tech.turnipofpower.com. So actually, those 50 people that visit my other two blogs, also visit tech.turnipofpower.com daily.
# turnipofpower.com - 77%
# tech.turnipofpower.c32om - 22%
see how it recognizes over 3x the traffic to my main site?
Also, I have the Alexa toolbar at work, and only access turnipofpower.com there and not my other sites. So each day at least one additional toolbar visit than the other 2 sites should be detected.
WoW! Hot baseball news in Nigeria! Love it! I am not surprised of the changes. Maybe someone has forgotten how to make a good algorithym?
Good info. I have the thingy at the bottom of my browser (FF3) for Alexa. I think I shall be removing it.
Beamer
We should use some different ranking systems like: Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Google Trend..
Alexa ever accurate
I agree. I have two blogs, one gets a lot of unique visitors everyday while the other one does not get much traffic. The Alexa ranking of the popular blog is over 2Mil while the least popular blog is under 1Mil. I don’t think I’ll see the day where Alexa and Google ranking will make sense at all.
I do think there’s something to the new numbers though, cause John Chow’s Alexa numbers suck.
@ Jennifer
I’m there with you, started 4 months ago, my Alexa Rank is 150k, with no google pr. I get about 35k uniques a month.
I agree that the new alexa rankings are not quite right. I have used the quantcast results and spoken with a lot of advertisers who gree that they are a lot more accurate.
I agree. It seems that many web masters take Alexa rankings with a grain of salt, which they should! Alexa doesn’t carry legit information. If an alexa tracker were to be installed with Firefox or with Internet service providers, the information would be majorly different.
It’s sad that advertisers don’t look to content, but instead these Alexa rankings which can easily be faked!
My blog saw a massive improvement when Alexa changed their algorithm eariler in the year. Leapt into the 70K range from virtually nowhere, which I’m certainly not complaining about.
I’ve wondered for a while how accurate the algorithm can possibly be, but, as you say, advertisers often use Alexa as an indicator of potential reach, so accurate or not, the figure has weight.
What is interesting is that, since joing Entrecard, my graph has spiked dramatically - which is fantastic of course. But my traffic hasn’t ncreased in a corresponding spike. Obviously, what this means is that Entrecard users have the Alexa toolbar and I’ve now dramatically skewed the ratio. Great for me while there are many out there who still put stock in Alexa, but does again undermine the authority of the Alexa ranking system.
With my experience alexa is not that great. It is great to see how well you rank with other sites that is if you are in the 100-1000000 sites.
Maybe we should all just quit paying much attention to Alexa.
I know the advertisers will still pay attention.
But we can stop using it for deciding who we want to link to, etc.
It’s interesting because Alexa is important to bloggers mainly, because once you step out of the blogosphere, Alexa has no meaning. However, to your point Turnip about Google penalizing posters for pay per posts, I am confused. I recently read an interview with Matt Cutts of Google (interview by Eric Enge) that Google does not penalize for PPP, as long as you have disclosure. So I took off on a fact finding journey and discovered there are blogs out there who do 60% PPP and still have high PR…what’s up with that? Then there are some like mine that don’t have any PR…honestly I just do what I do, and if Google and Alexa happen to be interested great, all that matters is if my readers are happy. This stuff will drive you batty!
700+ visits a day? Wow!!!
I must beat that record. Mine the best is still 500. Alexa stops recognizing Entrecard referred traffics. Try commenting on at least 50 sites a day. I’m sure you can see some difference in Alexa.
Passing +700 visitors isn’t a daily thing, but yesterday I hit 713.
Hmm…
Educative.
(disclosure: I have a small blog)
@TeasasTips : My PR went down from 3 to 2: Because I had installed PPP code.
Now I am confused what else?
My alexa rank increased recently after they put new algorithm. May be small sites are getting benefits after new formula.
However, it seems that putting alexa sparky on FF3 should be re-considered. Look at the comments.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/5362
No complains!
Actually, I no longer believe that Alexa’s new ratings are completely random. Instead, I think they are worse than random.
I was on vacation over the past week, and as I expected, over my traffic fell off. This trend was reflected in both Quantcast and Google Analytics. However, my Alexa stats climbed back up to my high levels from mid June.
I expect now that I’m back from vacation and interacting more online, Alexa will show my ratings plummet again.
If anything, I suspect the penalize people who actively participate in social media.
I had verified about Alexa redirects before I posted my article.
Would you like to check it again?
http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.enfotainer.com
I just checked it on IE, and it worked fine!
Alexa is fine for me.
Poetic Notes dot Com and may Kevin Paquet dot Com get equal amount of visitors, and are almost equal in Alexa by just 1,000 visitors.
both blogs get only 50-150 per day
while Pinoy Teens dot Net gets 1.4K - 1.7K per day.
Also, if you read their algorithm thoroughly, you’ll realize that they do not count the visits during the most recent update of theirs, but the visits in the past 3 months (or was it 30 days) in average.
So, it doesn’t means that your site (this one) is on top if it got more visitors for a couple of days, as your other sites may have been (in average) stronger than this site before (as we can see in the ranking, they’ve been quiet consistent)
I hope you get my point
However, of note, I got this error when I tried to run Alexa redirects from Firefox.
“Not Found
The requested URL /redirect was not found on this server.”
Enfotainer: I tried the link http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.enfotainer.com in both IE7 and firefox3. It worked in neither, and gives a “not found” error. If anyone gets that link to work, let me know, because I’ve tried 4 times on 2 browsers, and asked friends in messenger to try it.
Thanks for the education on Alexa. I also got the toolbar after the change and have nothing to compare it to. It gets pretty tiring to keep up with all the page ranking from Alexa and Google.
Happy: I’m giving quantcast a try. http://www.quantcast.com/turnipofpower.com is my quantcast page. My data will be public just like Alexa’s, except it will be accurate. No more bullshit bias against marketing blogs and Entrecard users.
Is the Alexa rankings determine the Page Rank of a site. I don’t understand how Page Rank works. My blog has Alexa rating of 500 thousand, it has visitors everyday… yet my PR is zero. Whereas, I saw a blog with an Alexa of 12 million, very few visitors, no links… yet it has PR 3!
Jenn: Alexa has nothing to do with pageranks, links or anything other than traffic. It’s supposed to count your visitors. Google’s Pagerank is related to backlinks.
I don’t trust Alexa either. Your rank is only 90,000 better then mine and I don’t think I have ever had more then 300 daily visitors. There is something wrong there!
I know this Greek guy named Alexa, he thinks my site sucks as well.
I always thought Alexa was a big failure and that you can’t rely on it’s data. Seeing people just like you say this and that about it, makes it even more obvious that Alexa’s days are numbered, unless they do something soon.
Razvan Dobre
Alexa is a joke, over the past 3 months the alexa score increased 300K when in fact our visitor numbers fell sharply as we concentrated on another sisiter site.
How on earth can your rank improve when traffic trends downwards?
We are not marketers and offer a service as distinct from flogging
products or affilliate stuff.
I am also surpirised at the great alexa numbers for new sites that are only just indexed by google. Clearly it is not just Alexa, but I am certain the numbers can be manipulated by webmasters
but sorry I have no evidence, but have seen alexa ranking software around that claims to be able to do the job which I think google discounts otherwise the PR would be rather higher given the claimed traffic - not wirhstanding other PR factors & linking.
I think Alexa has a lot to answer for
and the traffic data is absolute rubbush. An Australian .com.au site is not getting 65% of visitors from the USA and my stats prove 98% of our traffic is from AU so what gives?
Since I also do SEO - SEM as well as make sites for clients
I tend to focus on what google wants and these days ignore Alexa which is contraty to accepted rating of PR0 sites, personally I put no valiue whatsoever on Alexa ratings as they are clearly not an indicator I would trust and I certainly do go by my uniques visitros and refferal source as well as the keyword table to know what works.
Thankfully I do not need Alexa to get a new site indexed by google within 3 days, if Alexa influenced this there would be chaos.
My 2 cents worth of advice to all webmasters is to never ever put an alexa button on your site even if you are in the top 1% of all web properties on the planet.
I for one am not pleased that Alexa caches really old pages for years and probably does not respect robots.txt protocols.
Forget Alexa, you can easily provide traffic stats to advertisers
and manage your ad program with real figures.
Don’t have restless nights over Alexa, it is not worth the energy or the stress.
Concentrate on link building and the traffic comes, Alexa in of itself will not bring you anything worthwhile, but hey it is another backlink to your site.
Cheers
Jon
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