Are Alexa Site Rankings Accurate?

If you keep checking your website’s Alexa Ranking you might be wondering if they are accurate.  Your traffic statistics are improving, but then at the same time your Alexa Rank is getting lower.  And then when your traffic statistics shows you are getting less activity, suddenly your Alexa Rank is a lot better.  Sometimes, you might get high traffic with a high Alexa Rank.  You might wonder perhaps Alexa’s data is just not in real time.  The real reasons you might find a discrepancy between your traffic statistics and your Alexa Site Rank:

A) Alexa Site Rank is measuring your ranking compared to other websites.  If you are not one of those big popular websites like Google, Youtube, Yahoo, Facebook – or other websites in the top 10,000 rank – any change in other websites around your ranking will effect your site’s Alexa Ranking.  The lower site ranking you have on Alexa (i.e. ranked around 1 million for example), the more fluctuations in ranking your website can experience by just small changes in traffic by other websites around your ranking.

B) A question on Alexa’s accuracy – what data does Alexa use to figure out how much traffic your website is getting?  The traffic data is extrapolated from information they have from website visitors using Alexa and its tracking cookies – so it’s not as accurate as you embedding Google Analytics code on your website, or using other traffic statistics programs, such as cPanel’s Awstats program.

Our advice?  It’s fun sometimes to go look what your Alexa Site Rank is, but don’t agonize over it or measure your website’s success by it as you are developing your brand and building a following.  Focus on your traffic statistics, social media activity, improving your search engine rankings/seo, and having a quality website with quality content.  You know your website is a big success though with a lot of widespread worldwide interest and activity when you are in the top 10,000 on Alexa Site Rank.