Comments on: Alexa Bias Exposed by Top Google Engineers

By: johnson

johnson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:07:01 +0000

What I don’t really get is how some websites can jump so much in rank or lose a lot of rank in a few days or weeks. I read that you can make your alexa rank higher by visiting your own site with the alexa toolbar.

By: buzziboy

buzziboy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:20:32 +0000

Great information, thanks for sharing it with us. i will try it out for my newly kids portal http://www.buzziboy.com

By: osama

osama — Sat, 05 May 2007 16:31:23 +0000

u r right

By: Mmoore

Mmoore — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 13:33:40 +0000

Does anyone else not see the frailty of a ranking system based on a tool that is, by deafult, flagged as invasive and removed by SpyBot Search & Destroy?

Approximately 80% of all internet users I know personally, run SpyBot and Ad-Aware at least every other day on default settings and eliminate all cookies and all link trackers… I suspect the ratio of overall Internet users who do this might not be that high but vast numbers of families are networking at home and installing protective software without bothering to read any instructions and allowing it to run the show… these folks “skew” things too – they throw off AdWord conversions and click charges, and cause lost affiliate income.

It’s not entirely fair to blame Alexa’s skew on SEOs and Webmasters – some of us are not stupid and don’t want to artificially “enhance” our numbers because it nullifies our own research. I have Alexa installed on IE for purposes of accessing the stats on sites I research stats on, but I browse using Firefox.

By: Cvos SEO

Cvos SEO — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:22:50 +0000

A better way to estimate a specific website’s popularity is to look at the number of backlinks, social bookmarks (such as delicious) Google PR, technorati links, Wikipedia references, number of cached pages, PPC competition, and number of pages a search for “company name” produces.

Single source datasets are never reliable.

Would you buy a house based solely on its Zilllow.com valuation? A smart investor never would in a million years.

By: FreeKill

FreeKill — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:54:49 +0000

Hi Neil,

My apologies, I didn’t mean to single you out. I actually just applied to join so it was the first thing that came to mind.

Really, many places use Alexa as a determinant for “site status” which sucks for any of us little guys but really, there is no alternative so how can you blame them?

By: CarstenCumbrowski

CarstenCumbrowski — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:17:45 +0000

Compete.com is smart. They have an affiliate program and pay $1.55 for each refered user who downloads and installs the toolbar.

Did anybody play around with Trellians Popularity Index Rank?

http://pi.trellian.com/

Also don’t forget NetCraft and Ranking.com (TrustGauge)

By: Neil Patel

Neil Patel — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:03:59 +0000

Chris, we at Text Link Ads also feel that Alexa is not too reliable, but there are not too many other services that provide this kind of information. For this reason we feel that using multiple sources will help paint a more accurate picture of a website.

By: Chris S

Chris S — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:49:23 +0000

Alexa ranking is really poor, and it always kills me whenever I see someone use it as a metric for judging a site. For example, Text-Link-Ads uses it as one of its criteria for allowing new publisher sites to join…

Alexa is not only biased towards the sites you mentioned (and of course all Amazon.com sites) but it is also biased towards users of InternetExplorer (which is the only browser its toolbar works with).

Some of the sites I run have a 20-40% userbase of non-IE traffic, so right there you can write off all those users for improving my sites Alexa ranking…

I would love to see Google release a quarterly top 1 million websites list, based on the same formula as pagerank but taking into account actual incoming traffic from the google toolbar.

By: Patrick C

Patrick C — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:41:37 +0000

I’d really like to see Compete.com actually compete with Alexa in terms of site owner and advertiser adoption of their metrics numbers.

I also liked SEOmoz’s PageStrength, but it is dependent upon Alexa, Google & Yahoo for its own numbers, so it’s not standing on its own two feet.