Overview
The Alexa Rank is an estimate of how popular your site is relative to all other sites. It answers the question: Compared to all other sites, how is my site doing? It is designed to provide a quick summary of a site's performance relative to all other sites on the web. The authority of your site on the web can be translated as your Alexa Rank.As a public metric, potential advertisers, investors, and partners will look up your Alexa Rank and use it as a way to evaluate the value of your business. For this reason, improvements in your rank can make a finanical impact on your bottom line.
Calculation
Every day, Alexa estimates the average daily visitors and pageviews to every site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months is ranked #1. The site with the least is ranked somewhere around 30 million. If no one in our measurement panel visited a site over the past 3 months there is no rank at all for that site. According to Alexa.com, the Alexa Traffic Rank is calculated after collecting aggregated data from Alexa Toolbar users over the period of three months. The metric combines the amount of page views and user traffic. Traffic and page views are calculated per day, and then calculated from the average of these two numbers after time.
Metrics
- Global unique Visitors
- Global Pageviews
- Visitors by Country
- Visitors by Subdomain
Benefits
- Regarded as one of the most popular ranking system
- Advertisers use the ranking to evaluate marketing potential of a web site
- Higher ranking can lead to a higher bid to buy advertising space on a web site
- Increasing ranking can lead to a higher Google page rank since some metrics overlap
Concerns
- There are many websites without rankings due to not being registered with the Alexa toolbar
- Sources say that the Alexa ranking can be influenced or "gamed"
- Subdomains and subpages are not ranked. Traffic is only measured for the top-level domain only
- Many key SEO factors are not considered into the ranking
Top Ranked Sites
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Youtube.com
- Baidu.com
- Yahoo.com
Tools
- Alexa Rank Checker: Allows you to see the Alexa Ranking for any website
- WooRank: Online SEO Review & Optimization tool
- SEO Site Checkup: Online SEO Optimization tool
- Google AdWords: Online tool to create and manage ad campaigns to attract traffic to any website