There are many ways that website owners can judge the success of their websites. There are the rankings they get in the search engines like Google and Bing. There is the conversion of website visitors into customers or clicking on an paid-for-click-advertisement. Clearly most webmasters want traffic. They also want to know how their traffic compares to their competitors. For this reason many webmasters use the Alexa website rankings to see traffic to a competitors website. Alexa have a toolbar that over one million users have installed on their internet browser. Whenever a user visits a website, this information is sent to the Alexa compant, allowing them to rank sites based on the number of visitors. The highest trafficed site will get a ranking of 1. If a site has a ranking of 234 567, it means that the Alexa system have ranked it as the 234 567th most visited website among those with the toolbar installed.
Unfortunately the Alexa rankings are flawed and cannot be relied on. Firstly, the tool bar tends to be used by more technically orientated people, so the rankings will be biased towards the types of sites that these people visit. Additionally, the rankings are easily to alter. All that is needed is to install the Alexa toolbar and visit your own site several times a day. Even better, you can get some friends to do the same from different internet protocol addresses. This means that if you are trying to compare your Alexa ranking to that of another sites, yours could be artificially better as you have the toolbar installed and you do not know if the webmaster of the other site has the toolbar installed and is or is not trying to manipulate the rankings.
The Alexa ranking is used by some webmasters when trying to sell advertising or to sell a website to try and impress people with the traffic they are getting. However, it is not known if that is their manipulated one or a natural one.
|
