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SEO has created a lot of buzz in the market and its importance in the businesses. Generally, creating a website is a common technique that any business owner opts for promoting the business online.
For website’s performance result is based on factors DA – Domain Authority, PA – Page Authority, Age of the website, etc. Likewise, Alexa is a tool run by Amazon that offers web traffic data.
It calculates website traffic and tells the rankings of your website. Wanted to read further about Alexa Rank and then continue reading
What is Alexa Ranking?
While the term “Alexa Rank” is still often used, it’s important to remember that Alexa no longer provides website traffic rank information. The service shut down its website ranking feature in May 2022.
Previously, Alexa Rank referred to a system that estimated a website’s global popularity based on:
- Estimated average daily unique visitors: Alexa used its own methods to estimate the number of unique visitors who accessed a website each day over the past 3 months.
- Average pageviews per visitor: This metric counts the average number of web pages each visitor viewed on the website during a single session.
The lower a website’s Alexa Rank, the more popular it is considered to be. However, it’s important to note that these rankings:
- We’re not always accurate: Alexa’s estimates relied on sampling and extrapolation, which could lead to inaccuracies.
- Didn’t provide a complete picture: Alexa Rank only focused on two metrics and didn’t offer insights into other important factors like engagement, bounce rate, and user demographics.
Since the shutdown, several alternative website analytics tools have emerged that offer more comprehensive and precise data than Alexa Rank ever could. These tools provide insights into various metrics like:
- Unique visitors: Similar to Alexa Rank, but often with more accurate and granular data.
- Pageviews: The total number of times your website’s pages are viewed.
- Traffic sources: Where your website visitors are coming from (e.g., search engines, social media, direct referrals).
- User engagement: How long users are staying on your website, what pages they’re visiting, and how they’re interacting with your content.
These metrics are much more valuable for understanding your website’s performance and optimizing your content and marketing strategies.
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How Alexa Rank is Monitored?
To monitor the ranking, Alexa collects the data from thousands of browser extensions, widgets, and sites with installed Alexa script. They monitor the collected data as their ‘global traffic panel’ and utilize it as a sample representing all internet users.
It considers a proprietary methodology that merged average unique daily visits and pageviews per visitor over the past 3 months.
It tells the number of unique daily visitors from the number of users of their global panel who visited the website per day. Pageviews per visitor is the average number of Alexa’s global panel URL requests by the user for a website. If user has asked for the same URL various times on the same day then it is considered a single pageview. So, the conclusion is a combination of traffic and visitor engagement leads to top the ranking.
Alexa doesn’t consider subdomains for rankings. They sometimes make an exception for pages hosted on some famous websites like WordPress, if they can automatically identify them as personal homepages or blogs.
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Reliability of Alexa Rank
Alexa stated that they use data normalization to correct for biases in their data and also filter out the non–human and spam traffic. At the bottom line, the data available to them leads to the reliability of ranking.
As they stated on their website:
“Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. We do not receive enough data from our sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. “
Explain “if two websites are ranked for example. 1Cr to 3 Cr traffic then it doesn’t lead to reliable conclusions for traffic monitoring. On the other side, websites ranked beyond 1Cr are more likely to experience a big swing in their ranking position due to small estimated traffic differences between them.
For more information, refer certify metrics of your website by installing Alexa’s script on it. By this, Alexa will monitor the metrics directly rather than estimating.
What is the value of Alexa rank?
The value of Alexa Rank is a complex and nuanced topic, as it has both advantages and limitations. Here’s a breakdown of both sides:
Advantages:
- Relative popularity indicator: In the past, Alexa Rank provided a rough estimate of a website’s global popularity compared to other websites. This could be useful for benchmarking against competitors or tracking general trends in website traffic.
- Simple and easy to understand: The ranking system was presented as a single number, making it easy to grasp at a glance. This simplicity appealed to some users who didn’t want to delve into complex website analytics.
- Marketing tool: For some businesses, a high Alexa Rank could be used as a marketing tool to showcase their website’s popularity to potential customers or partners.
Limitations:
- Accuracy issues: Alexa’s estimates were based on sampling and extrapolation, which could lead to inaccurate rankings, especially for smaller websites or those with niche audiences.
- Incomplete picture: Alexa Rank only focused on two metrics, unique visitors and pageviews, neglecting other important factors like user engagement, bounce rate, and traffic sources. This limited the insights it provided about website performance.
- Manipulation potential: The methodology for calculating Alexa Rank was susceptible to manipulation, with some websites using tactics to artificially inflate their rankings.
- Deprecation: As of May 2022, Alexa no longer provides website ranking information. This makes it irrelevant to any current website analysis.
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Summary
Alexa Rank holds the same importance despite being shut down by Alexa.com. It offers crucial insights that help businesses to analyze their metrics, conduct competitive analysis, improve marketing goals, etc. It may not be accurate like Google Analytics but you can consider it as a complementary tool to boost your SEO strategy. Don’t forget: The lower the Alexa Rank, the better is traffic (roughly given by the Alexa).
