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The last time that we checked our Alexa rating was just before Christmas where it was sitting between 450,000 and 550,000. At that point our site had been live for 6 months. In the last week (July 2009) when we checked our Alexa ranking it was up at 22 million???Why did we drop so much? because just after Christmas 2008 the Alexa Toolbar was removed from our office computers. The biggest problem with Alexa is that they do not have access to event logs for websites. They can only measure websites that have been visited when the Alexa toolbar is downloaded onto your computer. According to our logs our traffic figures have actually increased by 500% since Christmas.
So is Alexa accurate? The figures so others say, can be manipulated by using the Alexa toolbar, downloading Alexa graphs and a whole load of other things that some people swear by. The lower your Alexa score is the more popular your site is meant to be. So that puts this site near the bottom with a score in the millions. LOL...
But what determines a popular site?
The number of total visits your site receives per day/week/month?
Th number of Unique Views?
The number of returning Visitors?
The amount of Page Views?
Time spent on your site?
Everyone will have a different opinion on this, some people don't think their site is successful unless they are receiving 100,000+ visitors per day, (even if viewers are only visiting for a minimum of 2 seconds).
Other people are happy with 10,000 visits a day but then maybe their visitors actually view 10 pages each. This in total is then equals 100,000 page views. Some site owners are happy with a couple of hundred visitors per day but their visitors actaually stay on their site for 20 plus minutes. This is good for sites where the end reult is for users to purchase goods. Other sites receive in internet terms little or no traffic if your numbers are below a couple of hundred visits per day. But where do these stated numbers actually come from? Has there been research carried out on the number of visitors websites actually receive? Advertising agencies know exactly how many viewers your site receives because they can ask for detailed information about your site before they wish to be associated with it. I'll discuss more of this at a later time....
So as far as Alexa goes I'll keep you up to date with any changes now that we've installed the alexa toolbar and graph on one of the popular pages of our site. It will be interesting to see if and when this will lower the alexa rank!
Update August 2009
Find out more about our updated Alexa Rank Score and the difference it made submitting to Digg.
Beating Content Thieves- Good blog on what to do if someone has stolen your content, What you can do about it, who to complain to etc…http://www.oldwelshguy.co.uk/web-marketing/beating-the-content-thieves-stolen-website-content