What is Wrong With Alexa Traffic Ranking?
January 3rd, 2007 by Andrew Chen
Both John and Tyler replied my post. I am really proud. When I read john’s post I didn’t believe a company backed by Amazon is running such a low quality traffic ranking system until I compare the traffic of the company I am working for to John’s blog. I didn’t think of doing that before. I am working for Local.com as database developer currently as I told you in my about page. According to our financial report. Local.com attracted more than 10 million visitors each month and is in the top 100 web sites in the US. When you look at Alexa traffic, here is it:
Its daily reach is even less John chow’s blog. However John’s blog has less then 100,000 visits last month according to his post. So John’s blog is only one percent of the traffic of Local.com. How can it have an average daily reach more than
Suppose Alexa technically competent to build a web traffic ranking system. Then the problem would be on its tool bar’s download population. I myself didn’t download Alexa tool bars and never use it. But according to Alexa, the tool bar was downloaded over 10 million times. I would say that download base should be able to give statistically meaningful results. But 100,000 visit ranks the same as 10 million? It is just doesn’t make any sense. Would it be that the 10 million Alexa tool bar users are more likely reading blog? It might be.
If Amazon uses its fame and financial strength to strike a deal with firefox or even a smaller company like Algoco, it can broaden its user base and increase the accuracy of it ranking system. If one day Alexa became the ultimate authority of web traffic ranking in the world, what kind of money it is going to make. I guess we have to ask Alexa, what is going wrong?
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Alexa rank is not based only on traffic from their company toolbar. Many small websites create their own toolbars via Alexa’s service and people who use it on that way (even if they maybe know it) create traffic too. In Serbia (where I live), it’s popular that kind of creating toolbars.
Also, Alexa give information of how their system works, so anybody can create his own toolbar or any add-on which sends traffic to Alexa.
I use one kind of that. It’s Search Status - excellent Firefox SEO Toolbar Extension. It’s excellent tool for any web developer. Before it, I never use any Alexa toolbar, but now I send traffic via Search Status.
Hi Andrew. It is pretty hard to do head-to-head comparisons like this without looking at all the factors. In your analysis you made one big dunder-headed mistake and at least one other major incorrect assumption.
Let’s start with the first big mistake. What is local.com? When they claim they get 10 million visitors per month, what pages are those visitors visiting? I’d bet that Local’s financial report is counting traffic to all pages that have the Local brand on them, whether or not they are on the local.com domain. These would include oodle.com, indeed.com, whitepages.com, and judysbook.com, among others. Alexa is only counting the traffic to local.com. All those other domains are not counted at all.
Now, let’s get to one of the major incorrect assumptions. What is a visitor? How does Local choose to count its visitors when bragging on their financial statement? Do you suppose they use a liberal counting method or a conservative method? What if a user visits several times a day… is he counted several times? What if he visits dozens of times per month, is he counted over and over again? Many sites count this way because it is an easy way to inflate their stats to make their investors happy and their advertisers eager to sign up. I can’t say for sure how conservative John Chow is when counting his users and/or whether he uses cookies to keep track of them. But I can say this, he most definitely is NOT using the same method as local.com and he probably doesn’t have as much incentive to exaggerate his visitors numbers.
That, in essence, is the value of a 3rd party rating service. You can be sure that we are counting both of them the same way.
So, is Alexa right? I don’t know. But it is definitely not nearly as wrong as you suggest.
I didn’t notice that they have other way of collecting data. But seems downloaded tool bar is till their major data source. This is what it says on the tool bar download page:
And again if they have other ways of callecting data. The sampling base should be more diversify and the result should be more accurate. Maybe their engineer can dig into the traffic data of Johnchow.com and Local.com to find out what is wrong.
I am pretty sure Local.com is only couting the traffic to the page the company host becuase these add on services, oodle.com, indeed.com and whitepages.com were not there at the time when the financial report released.
Take a step back treat the 10 million as page views and compare to JohnChow.com’s 184,640 page views it is still a difference of 50 times. How much better Alexa looks like? It still spells something very wrong with Alexa, either in its ranking algorithm or in its sampling base.
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