How does the Alexa Traffic Ranking system works? Well, the Alexa website provides a downloadable toolbar for people to download on their computers. This downloadable toolbar is only compatible with Firefox and not Internet Explorer. Therefore, if a person is only running Explorer on his or her computer, then this person will not be able to download the Alexa toolbar. Then how can one truly trust the accuracy of the Alexa Ranking method?
A few third party websites provide a free downloadable toolbar that will work with Internet Explorer. However, downloading any free software from the Internet is risky business. One should only download free software from websites after extensively researching that site and making sure it is safe.
The Alexa Ranking system uses different methods of measuring page views and traffic to a website. These methods are very inaccurate, especially when the website in question has low traffic.
The system only accurately ranks websites that are rank under 100,000. Any website that is rank over 100,000 is not accurately ranked. In other words, the Alexa Ranking system cannot accurately determine if a website is ranked 200,000. Why is this so?
The reason why websites ranking higher than 100,000 cannot be accurately measured is because these websites receive very low traffic, which means that too few people with the downloaded toolbar actually visit these websites for an accurate measurement to be obtained. There is simply not enough information to accurately rank these low traffic websites.
This is why the analytics for a particular website could be showing an increase in web traffic, but not showing any increase in page rank. Conversely, a website can be experiencing decrease traffic for a particular day, but the rank of the site still shows an increase for that day. This seams confusing, but this is truly what happens when one looks at site rank and traffic of websites that are ranked greater than 100,000.
The higher up the rank a website gets though, is the more accurate its traffic rank measurements and data, in relations to other websites on the internet, becomes. Therefore, a website that ranks #2 has more accurate data, which is derived from more people who have downloaded the toolbar. The rank of such website is therefore more reliable. In this case, there are many people who have the toolbar, so the sample size is much larger, thus giving a more accurate measure of visitors to the site.
In many cases the Ranking system used by Alexa could be affected by its method of measuring website traffic. With millions of hosts on the Internet, it is often difficult to determine which hosts are serving the same content. This is why automatic procedures used to measure data can be incorrect, Alexa. This explains why many websites usually experience fluctuations in their site rankings, day after day.
There are very few websites that are successful on the internet, which means that there is a very large amount of websites that don't do well, in terms of traffic. There is definitely a larger quantity of websites with ranks greater than 100,000 than there is with ranks less than 100,000.
Accurate site ranking for sites with less than 1,000 visitors per month is often very difficult to achieve by the Alexa Ranking methods because of the enormous size of the Internet and the large concentrations of visitors on popular websites, Alexa.
Therefore, one should not only depend on the Alexa Ranking system to determine the overall popularity of a website because it is often inaccurate when it comes to measuring websites with low monthly visitors of less than 1,000 per month or website with ranks greater than 100,000. A website can therefore be doing well for a given period, in terms of traffic and still not be ranked well.
