The first page of , one of the few we monitor, was written last November 11 and as one would expect, the first page was actually only an “About” page.
The only activity the site had so far was to play around with a few WordPress themes using a plugin called “Theme Test Drive” and experimented with WordPress plugins like Snazzy Archives and Syndication for prospective clients.
SHOWCASEpage.net activated the Syndication plugin to grab RSS feeds from other sites (including this site) which was later deactivated and also the resulting articles were “unpublished” from the site.
Today, we noted that this site has an Alexa ranking of 12,126,403 (see screenshot). Yes, only after 2 months and a few pages most of which were RSS feeds. Shouldn’t we be happy that this site achieved that ranking in only a short a time and with hardly any activity?
We don’t think so. We have other experimental sites which have not come close to this ranking. And some of the sites have been online for a while.
So what’s wrong with Alexa? Or, what’s wrong with the other sites we have been monitoring too?
We don’t know yet. We have read somewhere that the Alexa system is flawed. But without having a complete picture of how Alexa does its maths, we cannot comment on those statements.
But the situation we have at the SHOWCASEpage.net website certainly requires a closer look.
Is there really something in this site that is attracting traffic? We don’t know yet. We will install additional metrices in our pages and find out what’s causing this abnormality and see if the Alexa ratingsystem is giving us reliable measurement.
Updated 25 September 2009: SHOWCASEpage.net has an Alexa traffic rank of 1,980, 477 and we have with references to Alexa’s Help pages posted in July 2009 where Alexa acknowledged that Alexa’s traffic rankings beyond 100,000 are not statistically meaningful.
![[blank] Del.icio.us](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/delicious.png "[blank] Del.icio.us")
![[blank] digg](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/digg.png "[blank] digg")
![[blank] Facebook](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/facebook.png "[blank] Facebook")
![[blank] Google Bookmarks](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/google.png "[blank] Google Bookmarks")
![[blank] Stumble Upon](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/stumbleupon.png "[blank] Stumble Upon")
![[blank] Technorati](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/technorati.png "[blank] Technorati")
![[blank] Twitter](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/twitter.png "[blank] Twitter")
![[blank] Yahoo My Web](http://techbusiness.com.au/wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarks/images/yahoo.png "[blank] Yahoo My Web")
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Firstly, the Alexa score, 12,126,403, is actually very low as Alexa works with 1 being the highest.
Secondly, the reason that Alexa is so flawed is that they primarily take their data from people who are surfing the web using the Alexa toolbar (which is probably quite a low number now a days as if people are going to use a toolbar they are more likely to opt for Google or some Firefox plugin.).
With these points in mind, I would ignore any information you get from Alexa and use your own analytics package for a more accurate depiction of traffic to your site.
[Reply]
dIFLY – Thanks for the comments.
Yes, we know that the 12+ million ranking is very low. And we know that the #1 spot (which is the highest) is a struggle between Google and Yahoo these days. And we know too that the flaw in Alexa’s is that it is biased towards users who are using the Alexa toolbar which as you mentioned are only few these days.
Having said that, the question still remains: How does Alexa calculate its numbers? For example, as of to date, 3.11.09, SHOWCASEPAGE.NET has an Alexa traffic ranking of 2,503,250 — a big jump from the lowly 12+ million ranking. How was this number calculated? Based on our own analytics, the site did not register that much traffic during the period to be able to achieve that big improvement. No, we are not complaining. Why should we?
Regarding your suggestion to ignore Alexa’s because it is flawed, much to our desire to do that, unfortunately it still remains a site-popularity indicator in the eyes of advertisers and online ads buyers. Until such time the industry comes up with an alternative solution, it would be prudent for us to live with Alexa’s traffic ranking system without necessarily relying on it solely to measure site performances.
[Reply]
See our updating notes (bottom of article) where Alexa’s Help pages posted in July 2009 acknowledged that the traffic rankings beyond 100,000 are not statistically meaningful.
[Reply]