Is Alexa REALLY useless?
The Alexa Ranking is one of the most popular tools today to measure a websites ranking. There are 2 extremes when it comes to this popular tool. There’s a bunch of people who swear by it and consider it the only and best way to measure a website’s traffic, and there’s the other group of people who think Alexa is pure useless and doesn’t mean anything. In-between, there is the other group who say Alexa is not good for the sites that are of higher ranking, but a good measurement for the lower ranking ones.
Here is the thing. Traffic wise, the third group is right, or let’s just say, they are “more right” than the other 2. If your site is in the top 5,000 there is more chance that Alexa represents the ranking of the traffic better than the site in the 7 digits.
But the whole Alexa issue goes beyond the reasoning of these 3 groups. Alexa today is not only a measure of traffic, but also a measure of money. You see, money wise, little does it matter that Alexa represents your true traffic level when a big portion of people who work in the online industry think that it really matters. What am I talking about? Let’s pick 2 companies, Review Me and Pay Per Post. Both these companies let you put a pricing for every post you do for advertising a company. Both also make use of the Alexa Ranking. Why do they do that? Because they think it’s important! And they will pay you more because of it! For them, the Alexa Ranking is not only important, but a very important criteria. For you this means that even if you do know that you have a higher traffic level than someone else with a lower ranking, you might not get paid nearly close the other website because these companies actually Alexa is good.
In other words, depending of what you think about Alexa’s accuracy, if 90% of people around you are uninformed and think Alexa ranking is actually good, then I can guarantee you that it will affect you as well, whether you are right or wrong, given you want to make money advertising. I mentioned these 2 companies before, but Alexa goes beyond just getting paid for posts, for example selling domains, selling websites, putting advertising on your site, etc…
May 4th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
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