The problems with Alexa are the following: • • • • •
My site is not as important as the above graph shows. If it were, I might be retired by now. ☺ Alexa does not get much direct traffic and has a limited reach with its toolbar. A small change in site visitor count can represent a huge change in Alexa ratings. Alexa is biased toward webmaster traffic. Many times new webmasters are only tracking themselves visiting their own site.
Why do many marketing hucksters heavily promote Alexa? Usually for one of the following reasons: • •
• •
Ignorance If you install the Alexa toolbar and then watch your own Alexa rating quickly rise as you surf your own site, it is easy for me to tell you that you are learning quickly and seeing great results, thus it is easy to sell my customers’ results as being some of the best on the market If many people who visit my site about marketing install the Alexa toolbar, then my Alexa rating would go exceptionally high The marketers may associate their own rise in success with their increasing Alexa ranking, although it happens to be more of an issue of self-selection than a direct correlation
A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions, then your site likely has next to no traffic. Alexa by itself does not mean much. It simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. Also, it is hard to compare sites in different industries. For example, if I created a site about weight loss, there would be many more people searching for it than a site about SEO. Also, you shouldn’t forget the webmaster bias the tool 113