How Does Alexa Rankings Work?

There has been a lot of confusion on how Alexa ranks websites, and tracks traffic. And more confusion on how Alexa rankings work, and how they impact your SEO rankings. In this post I am going to show you how Alexa works, and help you decide whether or not it it is import for your online campaigns and success.

Alexa rankings give you several metrics, including Alexa traffic rank, Traffic Rank in US, Sites Linking in, and within their charts you can see your website history. In the example below, mine doesn’t have any historical data yet, but that is where it would be (along with my Global and US rank)

Where Does Alexa Get Their Data From – Is It Reliable?

Alexa gets their website rankings from the Alexa Toolbar, which people can install into their computer browsers. It basically tracks your activity on the internet, the websites you visit, and how often you visit.

This is where Alexa gets most of the data, so they have a very little amount of data to work with because only a small amount of people have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers (they have around 15-20 million downloads, but many are no longer active). A large portion of the downloads are internet marketers who want to track their Alexa rankings for their website.

Alexa also claims to get some data from some other unknown sources. (but who knows..)

A big concern of mine is that the Alexa toolbar is considered “adware” or a potential virus by MacAfee (an anti-virus software).  Other major anti-virus programs consider the toolbar “trackware” because of how it works (it tracks and stores all of your web activities). If you have it installed, all of your activities on the computer are being tracked, and what you are using it for is pretty useless because it’s not real traffic data.

How to Increase Your Alexa Ranking?

The most obvious way to increase your Alexa rankings would be to get more website traffic right? Wrong!

More traffic does not give you higher traffic rankings in Alexa.

I did a test on two different websites to see if Alexa was valid. The first website I tested was getting over 10,000 unique clicks per day, and the second website was getting a little over 1,000 unique clicks per day. So the first website was getting 10 times the traffic of the second website, however Alexa said the second website was getting twice as much traffic as the first in their ranking.

Complete Sham. Alexa ranking data is completely wrong. Getting more traffic to your website is supposed to build your rank, obviously, but not with Alexa website ranking. The way to get higher Alexa rankings is to get more people to visit your website that have the Alexa toolbar installed, but that is WAY too much work and very hard to monitor.

Alexa has no way to determine REAL website data (only the owner of the website can access real traffic stats).

The traffic data is based on their toolbar, so the more people that visit your site and have the toolbar installed will improve your Alexa rank.

How to Check Alexa Rank

If you are wondering how to find your Alexa rank, you can visit their site directly at alexa.com . You can also install their “adware” toolbar (not recommended).

It will not be very beneficial if you know your Alexa rank, and it will not be a good indication of how your website ranking compares to other website rankings. Because they DO NOT have the correct data!

If you want to find out where your website ranks in Google (which is important when determining how good your SEO is), there are tools that can scan Google and tell you where your website is ranked (what page of Google you are on) when people use specific keywords.

If you want to see what page you are ranked on in Google, I recommend that you use Jaaxy.com because it is the easiest and most reliable.

Is The Alexa Ranking Package Worth It?

On the Alexa website there are many different services they try to sell you. They are located on the sidebar when you visit the Alexa site.

I tried one of them (Get Certified Metrics) and take it from me, if you purchase this it will be a waste of money!

The “Get Certified Metrics” is a service where you have to pay to give Alexa your accurate data and stats. Shouldn’t they be giving you the correct metrics for free? It’s what they do. There is no value in using this, and if you are interested please save your money.

Does Alexa Rank use SEO?

How Alexa scores your website Is not a good indicator of how well it ranks in Google or how it reflects website success.

Alexa rank has no correlation to SEO or how well your site gets indexed. If someone tells you that Alexa means something and uses their rank as a reason for you to join their service, dont do it.

How Much Does Alexa Cost?

Alexa has a 7 day free trial, they also offer 3 different packages to join their program.

• Basic – $9.99/month
• Insight – $49/month
• Advanced – $149/month

All of these plans are just like Google Analytics (which is free), and they give you different Analytics and Webmaster Tools based on the package.

My #1 recommended tool to track your website traffic is cheaper, and you get A LOT more information!

Final Thought

Alexa does not efficiently or accurately track the traffic on your website, and they do not help indicate your SEO efficiency. If you want to optimize your website the best thing you can do is to learn yourself, and there are services out there that can help you with this. If you want to get help with your rankings in Google, you can get REAL education here !

I hope this has helped you with questions you may have had about Alexa. If you have any questions or experience with Alexa website ranking, please leave a comment below.

Your Friend,

Karissa