I’ve been meaning to write about Alexa Ranking for a while now. Is it really that important or is it just bs? In my opinion it is just bs and I will tell you why.

But for all the newbies who, like me (until a few months ago), have no idea what Alexa Rank is, I will explain that first. Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases itself on how many visitors a website receives. Please note, that only visitors that have the Alexa Toolbar installed are included.

A lot of people find it very important to rank high in Alexa. I guess it must be some status thing; the higher you rank, the more important your website is. But is this really true? If you rank high in Alexa, does that equal a busy or popular site?

I’ve told you in the post ‘So far‘ about my different websites. Site 1 has about 500 unique visitors a day which at least doubles on event days. Site 2 has about 30-70 unique visitors a day. Now when it comes to the Alexa Rank, site 2 is ranked much higher than site 1. Does that mean that site 2 is better or more popular? Of course not! In this case it is absolutely bs that site 2 ranks higher! The only reason it has a higher ranking is because obviously more visitors have the Alexa toolbar installed than the visitors who visit site 1.

You can imagine that sites about seo, webpromotion, etc. rank pretty high because webmasters are more likely to have an Alexa toolbar installed then your average internet surfer.

Maki from Dosh Dosh wrote an interesting article about 20 quick ways to increase your Alexa Ranking. It’s very interesting to read, but it also shows that you can manipulate the rankings.

If you don’t have the Alexa toolbar and want to install the toolbar for Internet Explorer, click here. If you use Firefox, get the extension here.

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