What is alexa rank

But do you know what is Alexa rank and what value it has for you? How exactly do we use it? What does it have to do with pre-launch analytics? Alexa rank is a global website popularity ranking created by Alexa Internet company , which is a subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa uses web traffic data to make an ordered list of the most popular sites on the Internet. Alexa rank lets you know how popular your site is compared to all other sites. The top sites on the web Source: alexa.

There are tens of millions of sites ranked by Alexa. The most popular site has 1 rank, and the least popular site is ranked somewhere around 30 million. Also, there are sites without assigned rank because of insufficient data. The number of visitors to a site versus the rank Source: alexa. To calculate the ranking, Alexa gathers data from thousands of browser extensions, widgets and sites with installed Alexa script. Alexa rank is determined using some proprietary methodology that combines average unique daily visits and pageviews per visitor over the past 3 months.

Alexa estimates the number of unique daily visitors from the number of users of their global panel who visited a site that day. If a user requests for the same URL multiple times on the same day, it counts as a single pageview. Alexa does not rank subdomains separately from their domains. That said, they make exceptions for pages hosted on some popular sites like WordPress if they are able to automatically identify them as personal homepages or blogs.

Alexa claims that they use data normalization to correct for biases in their data and also filter out non-human and spam traffic. However, the accuracy of Alexa ranking is limited by the data available to them. As they state on their site :. We do not receive enough data from our sources to make rankings beyond , statistically meaningful. Everyone wants high rankings on Google. Alexa rank is a global ranking system and a subsidiary company of Amazon.

It ranks literally millions of websites in order of popularity, with the lower your Alexa rank, the more popular your site is according to Alexa at least. It also looks at how a website is doing relative to other sites, making it a useful benchmarking KPI or for competitive analysis. Traffic and engagement are estimated from data provided by its toolbar.

This monitors a user browsing behavior which acts as a sample of all Internet users. If you want to contribute data to the rank, to get started you just need to download and install the Alexa toolbar :. This will display the Alexa Rank of the visited website. It will also send traffic data to a central server, recording your IP address and the URL you are visiting. This data is gathered from internet users who use one of the browser extensions available for Google Chrome , Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.

The Alexa ranking algorithm audits a site and calculates the frequency of visits. If the same user visits a website more than once on the same day, it is counted as a single visit. From here, the site with the highest combination of unique visitors and page views is ranked Number 1. It has also been said that Alexa sources third-party data to give a broader view of internet users.

In fact, people have compared Alexa vs Google Analytics , coming to the conclusion that Alexa is not as accurate. Remember, the lower the better. This is probably because Google has a much wider coverage than Alexa, as not everyone will have the Alexa toolbar installed to track. Because of this lower coverage, treat Alexa rank as an overview for comparison purposes and not an absolutely accurate overview of a website.

By creating a JavaScript function to open an array of page addresses from your website, you can artificially increase your Alexa rank. The goal is to get each address to open in a separate window, thus increasing pageviews. Of course, this is not recommended as it is horrible for UX. How many times have you been annoyed by one of those sites that makes you click through to multiple pages to read just one article?

However, the better and recommended way of improving it is to write good and regular content to get the right traffic to your site. Alexa rank is a measure of website popularity. It ranks millions of websites in order of popularity, with an Alexa Rank of 1 being the most popular.

Alexa Rank reveals how a website is doing relative to all other sites, which makes it a great KPI for benchmarking and competitive analysis. Traffic and engagement are estimated from the browsing behavior of people in our global panel, which is a sample of all Internet users.

If you want your business to succeed, it is important to track your website performance. But most analytics tools do not show how your performance compares to your direct competitors. Many people ask us: How can I improve my Alexa Rank? We understand how important this metric is for you and your business. A rain dance? Homage to the patron saint of Alexa rankings? What is Alexa Rank? If the same user visits the website multiple times in one day, it is counted as one visit.

Thus, with this combination of unique daily visitors and average pageviews, Alexa rank is calculated. Up to this point, you may be thinking how Alexa rank compares to Google Analytics.

However, this fact does not mean that Alexa rankings are useless. Conducting keyword research is one of the most important tactics you can employ to improve your SEO and this simple tool can help you discover future keywords to use. One clever way you can use this website is to compare your success with your competitors to see how you stack up against your most important SEO rivals. The simple answer to whether Alexa rank impacts your SEO is yes it does.

Like SEO, striving for a low Alexa ranking i. It may be helpful to think of Alexa rank and SEO as a cause-and-effect relationship. If you invest time in SEO and optimize your site to rank highly on Google, your Alexa rank will improve and drop closer to 1. You can of course pay for more information on the Alexa website.