I don’t really get Alexa ranking

I was never interested in my Alexa ranking, but the other day i found out mine was around 180.000. It seemed a little too low (the lower the number, the better the rank) so i thought i should digg into this matter for a moment.

First of all, i took a look at my previous rankings. I had like 55K back in September. OK. Since then my traffic dropped severally, from 100K a month till just 30K. So i said to myself: it’s OK, there are lots of sites ranked by Alexa, so i guess this is my position. And i left it be.

Yesterday on the other hand, i started surfing some blogs trough the Entrecard network and i found lots of other sites with better rankings but with a lot less visitors. So that made me wonder how is this Alexa ranking really calculated.  Alexa’s stats are based on the data collected by the users that installed the Alexa Toolbar. OK. Why would a normal Internet surfer install this Toolbar? Well, it won’t, as the toolbar only has some use for webmasters, providing them ranking, stats and some analysis of their competition.

But i finally understood this Alexa thing. As you can learn from their site:

"the Alexa traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago."

So, as long as my visitors have the Alexa Toolbar installed on their browser, my rankings will go up. Hmmm, but since 65% of my traffic comes from search engines and consists mostly in regular web surfers and not web savvys, i doubt they have this stupid toolbar. Thus, my ranking is going down.

Well, i guess there’s nothing I can do about this. I won’t try any Alexa rank boosting methods , cause i don’t really care about their Rank. I don’t use Text Link Ads and other link selling methods like that one, which highly value Alexa Rank. But that can’t stop me from afirming that Alexa ranking Sucks ! Right?

Tags: Alexa, rank, SEO, webmaster