Andrew
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| The Alexa Toolbar |
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The Alexa Toolbar is a downloadable browser component that installs into your Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater.
The toolbar serves two purposes, providing information to Alexa and for the user.
For Alexa, information about the sites that you are visiting is sent to their database and used to provide rankings for all the domains on the web. These rankings can be seen at their website in the Global Top 500 list, Top English Language sites, and their enhanced version of the DMOZ directory.
The Alexa toolbar also provides the user with the popularity rank for each site that they visit as they surf the net. Note that this is a per domain ranking, unlike Google Page Rank which is a per page ranking.
The value of the Alexa toolbar to the webmaster is the ability to roughly gauge the traffic for a particular site of interest. For example, perhaps you are considering whether to participate in a link exchange with a site, for the purpose of getting more traffic to your website. If the site under consideration has no traffic, then the program isn't likely to be worth the time. Using the Alexa ranking, a webmaster may be able to make a more accurate determination of the relative amount of traffic. The larger the ranking number, the lower the traffic is likely to be, so if the ranking was something like 1,092,459, then no matter how slick the website looks, or how high the Google Page Rank is, that site doesn't have a huge amount of traffic.
The downside of using the Alexa toolbar to gauge traffic is that the Alexa ranking is subject to a relatively small sampling (people who use the toolbar), and the ranking can be artificially manipulated to some degree. The small sampling pool tends to provide better Alexa rankings to those types of websites that are likely to be frequented by webmasters (or more generally, users of the toolbar).
If you mentally group Alexa rankings into tiers by order of magnitude, it smoothes out some of the factors that lead to inaccuracies.
Tier......Alexa Rating..........Example Site
1...........1-9.........................Yahoo, Google
2...........10-99.....................CNN, NBA
3...........100-999..................WSJ, Drudge, WebmasterWorld
4...........1,000-9,999............Time, American Idol
5...........10,000-99,999.........Luxor Hotel
6...........100,000-999,999
7...........1,000,000+
For the very largest sites the Alexa rankings have good degree of accuracy. Any ranking within tier 1, 2, 3 or 4 is fairly accurate, and not subject to manipulation attempts by a single webmaster. However, a site like WebmasterWorld, where many visitors are likely to have the toolbar installed, is certainly overranked compared to a site in the same tier like the Drudge Report. Of course, if you were wanting to gauge the popularity of a site with webmasters, as opposed to the general public, then WebmasterWorld probably isn't overranked by Alexa.
Rankings in tier 5 or below, should be treated a bit more suspiciously as they tend to be less accurate. But, obviously, a tier 7 website is not too popular.
Finally, one of the nice features of the toolbar is the Related Links section. From their database of surfing, Alexa displays related websites for many sites you visit. This can be quite useful to quickly find similar sites that might not be found as easily through the search engines and is a good resource when researching possible link partners and more.
If you are interested in trying the Alexa toolbar, you can download it at the Alexa site from the following link...
http://download.alexa.com/alexa7/startpage.html?p=Dest_W_t_40_B2
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Tue Mar 16, 2004 11:04 pm |
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altyfc
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It should be noted that, whilst Alexa is OK as a very, very approximate guide, it's figures are very shakey. They are skewed in favor of webmaster-related sites and, for some reason, with Korean sites also. The toolbar is apparently very popular in Korea.
As an example, our AardvarkBusiness.net site currently has an Alexa ranking of 19,642, and our AardvarkSport.net site are ranking of 45,400. Yet Aardvark Sport (being older than Aardvark Business) actually gets double the amount of traffic! AardvarkTravel.net... well that's at 15,818 - not too dissimilar to Aardvark Business but getting 6 times the traffic of that site.
The moral of the story - interpret Alexa stats with caution!
Aaron
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Thu May 06, 2004 9:00 am |
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Andrew
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quote:
Rankings in tier 5 or below, should be treated a bit more suspiciously as they tend to be less accurate.
Right, thanks for providing some real world examples that demonstrate what I was talking about. Those rankings you discussed are in tier 5, which I indicated should be treated suspiciously. Your first-hand knowledge of their stats confirms this.
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Tue Jun 01, 2004 5:04 pm |
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jukemann
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I disreguard any data that Alexa ranking gives. Only a small portion of internet users have it installed and most are webmasters or other marketers pumping up their rankings.
But unfortunately it is the only publicly know web ranking that is available. (Besides Google PR ranking (which is based on number of backlinks to the site and content riched keywords.)
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Sun Jun 20, 2004 4:26 pm |
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spyder
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I've also seen "alexa enhancers" available from websites - do they work?
If so then alexa data is highly suspect - but still, many websites for sale quote alexa statistics as a selling point.
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Fri Aug 27, 2004 10:13 am |
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jukemann
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quote:
Originally posted by spyder
If so then alexa data is highly suspect - but still, many websites for sale quote alexa statistics as a selling point.
Because there are many people in that don't realize they are looking at skewed data and buy into it.
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Fri Aug 27, 2004 12:53 pm |
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altyfc
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...and because there's little else out there to provide a reliable indication of a website's relative popularity. Once Google start doing what Alexa does with their toolbar - if they ever do - then we might have a more reliable indicator.
Aaron
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Tue Sep 07, 2004 7:44 am |
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Andrew
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Aaron is certainly right. And yes, Alexa enhancers do allow webmasters of sites that rank lower to cheat. Although once a site reaches Tier 4, such trickery becomes much harder.
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Wed Sep 08, 2004 1:53 am |
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altyfc
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Yes, I would agree. Once you are into tier 4 it is unlikely that your own a single individual's own browsing habits are likely to affect the rankings all that much.
Aaron
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Mon Sep 13, 2004 1:51 pm |
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Andrew
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In this particular case, I would even go as far as to say that intentional manipulation will have little practical effect.
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Mon Sep 13, 2004 8:09 pm |
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xboxundone
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For the Alexa toolbar if you get say 5 people to install the tollbar and visit your site once a day..... Your rankings will go way up.
IMO alexa toolbar sucks in its self and the rankings suck even more!
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Fri Sep 24, 2004 5:27 pm |
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Andrew
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For me, I'm currently using both Google's and Alexa popup blockers, and they each seem to get some that the other one misses. So that's a plus to me.
The Internet is filled with highly flawed but useful tools.
Both Google and Alexa toolbars included. We've already discussed weakness of Alexa, but even the PR on G's toolbar isn't necessarily an accurate reflection of the actual current PR being used in the Google algy. The Overture tools are also really handly, but of course not 100% accurate.
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Fri Sep 24, 2004 11:57 pm |
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xboxundone
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i think just goes to show your ranking is about as predictable as the stock market.
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Sat Sep 25, 2004 2:17 am |
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Colinc
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Alexa does have a benefit.....i had it loaded when i was working on a new site...and within 1 week Google had indexed it....
unintentionally on my part. 
I am convinced that the visits being recorded through Alexa helped the G bot find the site
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Tue Sep 28, 2004 2:14 pm |
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Andrew
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Interesting.
Some have speculated the same thing, but regarding the Google Toolbar.
Do you use that as well?
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Tue Sep 28, 2004 2:22 pm |
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