Mystery of Alexa Ranking

Mystery of Alexa Ranking

Alexa Rank is a ranking system, with the Alexa toolbar installed; it has its ranking schema on the traffic that each website receives from the number of visitors who visit a website.

This Alexa traffic rank is a combined measure of page views and users (visitors). Alexa computes on a daily basis the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web.

The main Alexa traffic rank is depend on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time. Therefore, the rank of a site reflects both the number of pages on the site viewed by those users and the number of visitors.

How to start with Alexa?

There are two easy ways for it.

With Internet Explorer: you just visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar.
With Firefox: you have to download the Search Status extension that displays the Alexa Rank, Google Page Rank etc.
What are the Problems with the Alexa Rank?

This Ranking is heavily skewed towards websites of a large webmaster or tech audience because web savvy audiences or webmasters are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.
It is an inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach potential and traffic.
It is a silly way to measure web traffic.
When measuring the value of advertising on your website it is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks.
There is still a question that as compare to Firefox and SearchStatus, Is Alexa toolbar more bulky and less useful?