The truth about the Alexa rank updates
After no updates for weeks, the Alexa ranking has now been updated in the Sparky toolbar, but not on the Alexa website, and only for the main domain, not for secondary pages. Meanwhile, Compete.com picks up the game and pitches itself as a more reliable alternative.
Bizarre and inconsistent updates
For my website, it is now 109,675 in the toolbar:
however the rank on the Alexa website is still 166,834.
However, this is only FOR THE MAIN DOMAIN – limeshot.com. For any secondary pages, the toolbar rank remains 166,834. Are they rolling out changes to the Alexa algo? Will we see page-specific ranking scores?
And to continue the string of inconsistencies, when queried from a third party tool such as website.grader.com, Alexa shows an entirely different value: 107,772 (most probably because Website Grader displays the real-time value).
UPDATE: Alexa seems to have updated today (properly): my rank across the site is now 107,772. I suppose no page-specific ranking just yet…
Alexa, Compete and world domination
I sort of feel that Alexa should get its game together – although to be perfectly honest I still haven’t figure out what their business model is. They can’t be making that much money out of advertising, and I don’t expect their affiliate program in collaboration with Amazon.com is that productive.
That being said, they may prefer to focus on rethinking their business model and refining that bottom line rather than worrying about toolbar updates.
Interestingly the Compete rank is getting pretty close to the Alexa rank – mine is 129,325 for the month of January.
In conclusion, the site ranking is the product that made Alexa famous, and the primary (if not only) driver of traffic to their website. If things continue like this Compete.com may have free way to world domination…
Fantastic site! I am loving it!! Will come back again (After St. Paddy’s) – subscribing to your feeds also, Thanks.
Alexa sucks – right away after they started. It’s just that all data is incorrect in a heavy way. You can’t trust Alexa and when you can’t trust an analytics software where is the use of it? Just my 50 cent.
alexa results can be scewed by having the alexa toolbar installed on several work machines, as it really only effectively tracks traffic from those sources (ones with the toolbar). I can check my logs and see how much traffic I am getting on a month per month basis and compare it, but it is still a bit of a stab in the dark when it comes to alexa. (and the HUGE wait you have to get them to update thumbnails)
Nick\\\´s last blog post: The collected t-shirt designs from the facebook gallery. site: [site]
Yep, it’s true, they can be skewed; but they do track the overall trend, and it would be really difficult to force your way to the top just by using a couple of work computers. And for the time being it is the only free option we have, apart from Compete, which is US-specific. Sure, I would love to get access to a more reliable benchmark, but for the time being this is all there is.
I feel that Alexa has slowly become irrelevant over the years. They do a head scratching job of collecting and reporting data. I really don’t pay much attention to them…to be honest. Compete.com is a much better source for search metrics.
Unfortunately Compete is US-centric, hence not very effective for non-US websites.
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Alexa is way too strange when measuring the traffic. Someday the results from Alexa are compared with google analytics and are almost the same, other times are different. And that’s strange for me, cause I had the impression that Alexa takes the data out from google analytics.
Alexa ranking is obtained from toolbar users from what I understand. So by refining the toolbar they are obtaining more accurate data, without which their services would be of no use. I think Alexa keeps track of individual sub domains while compete displays the traffic for the entire domain, sub domains and all.
I’ve found the Alexa rankings to be pretty inconsistent at times. I know any technology can be a bit erratic but Alexa was giving me incorrect traffic info for about 2 months!
@Indonesia 2009: Ah well, I suppose it helps in you can give away freebies. Also, social media has been invaluable in driving traffic.
Well, actually Alexa already tracks subdomains (and has been doing so for at least two years) while COmpete does not.
A good example is blogger.com and the various blogs hosted on the platform, each on a subdomain of the blogger.com domain.
What Alexa does not track yet is individual pages and directories.
I think this would be great if they started to rank sub-domains. I have only bought one domain name and use sub-domains to roll out new websites. Google treats these as separate entities, but alexa does not (at least not in the past). I’d be very interested in this feature. Do you know if compete does this, I never had a serious look at that.
Olivier.
I do not know much about Alexa, but seems clearly to me that limeshot.com has mad a good achievement to get Alexa’s attention by the traffict you made. COngratz and I believe you can goes much more. for me, I’m still crawling like a baby in millions range
Indonesia 2009\\\´s last blog post: Kampanye Damai Pemilu Indonesia 2009 site: [site]