Alexa is a free service which provides comparison of traffic of different websites by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources.Even though Alexa is widely acknowloedged as the best tool to estimate websites traffic ranks, however, there are some concerns by bloggers and webmasters over the accuracy of the Alexa ranking. Many of them say that the Alexa ranking is not reliable because Alexa computes the websites information mainly from the Alexa Toolbar.
Yahoo is ranked number 1 in the Alexa ranking. But that doesn't mean Yahoo has the most number of visitors and page-views. It is only known that Yahoo has the most number of Alexa Toolbar users. Why is this so?
The Alexa Toolbar is a Browser Helper Object for internet browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. The toolbar records which websites the user has visited and from there, Alexa ranks the websites accordingingly to their traffic.
However, not all internet users install the toolbar in their browsers. Therefore, Alexa does not exactly know the real hits of a website.
Here's an excerpt from the Alexa website -
Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage ... of Alexa Toolbar users.
The Alexa Toolbar works only with the Internet Explorer browser ... The Alexa Toolbar works only on Windows operating systems ... The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely.
Sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa.
Usually, technology and marketing websites would rank lower than health and recipe sites in the Alexa ranking. The main reason is that most of the Alexa Toolbar users are bloggers or webmasters who want to compare websites traffic rankings with competitors.
Therefore, they will most probably visit technology and marketing sites instead of health or recipe sites. So they increase the Alexa rank of some special websites and not all websites.
Of course, those technology and marketing websites will benefit from that.
Generally, I would say that Alexa is quite a useful and good tool to compare traffic of different websites. The only concern is that it is not accurate as not every browsers is equipped with the Alexa Toolbar. Besides using Alexa to measure your traffic ranking, you can try other alternatives such as Compete, Technorati or Google PageRank. However, they have their own disadvantages too just like Alexa.
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