Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Back in earlier December I wrote two pieces regarding Alexa traffic rankings -

• How Does AlexaRank Work And Should You Pay It Any Attention?
• How To Boost Your Alexa Ranking In One Easy Step

Many readers followed the advice I offered in the second article and placed the Alexa widget on their blog in an effort to test whether my theory works (see the second article above for details).

After reading through the many comments I received from other bloggers I’ve come to another conclusion, or at least a clarification of my previous claims (or disclaimer even!) -

Some people reported back that the Alexa widget did nothing or even decreased their AlexaRank. This group was in the minority. Most people reported some increase after placing the widget, but by no means would I consider the people who chose to comment on my articles a sample size large enough to prove even remotely conclusive.

Dave Davis from RedFly Studios placed the widget on a site receiving more than 20,000 unique visitors per day, which based on my experience should at least have an AlexaRank in the top 10,000, probably the top 1,000. Dave’s site sat around the 100,000 AlexaRank mark and didn’t improve after adding the widget.

Of the people who reported positive changes, none experienced as significant a change as I did. Most people reported small 5-10% gains. All three of my blogs jumped at least 25% a week or two after installing the widget. Was I just lucky? Is there something unique about my blogs? I can’t really say.

AlexaRank By Category?

Jon from Art of Money wrote a comment regarding the comparison of categories when calculating AlexaRank.

The other thing to keep in mind about Alexa rankings is the they are heavily skewed towards sites that are of interest to Internet savvy – since, like others mentioned, it only counts visits from people using the toolbar, which is more likely to be us stats addicted Internet workers.

So it is really only a valid comparison between two sites in “like” categories. A site about dogs, for example would have to have 100 times as much traffic as Yaro’s BlogTrafficSchool to get a number in the 40k range, since there are 100 times more of Yaro’s visitors using the Alexa toolbar (or now the Search Status plugin).

I had not consider this before, but it could be a way of explaining certain ranking anomalies, however Jon’s comments triggered a thought about another possible explanation using categories.

If sites were ranked compared to other sites in the same category, or against the total volume of traffic in a given category, this may help to explain different Alexa rankings compared to real server traffic, like the case with Dave’s site. I have no idea how this would be calculated or tested though.

Whatever the case, I find it disconcerting that something like AlexaRank could impact a site’s propensity to generate income, if the consistency of rankings appears to be quite unreliable.