Alexa Traffic Rank is Meaningless

About three months ago I started using the Alexa toolbar as I found it interesting to see how various websites ranked in terms of traffic. I knew how it worked: Alexa tracks traffic via anyone that has the toolbar installed and then produces stats on them. While I knew the statistics would be tainted due to the demographic that would use the Alexa toolbar (mostly webmasters) I thought it would be a reasonable way to track the popularity of my site.

One month, after writing lots of new content and getting lots of new backlinks I went up 2 million places! I was delighted with this progress. Another month passed and I added some more content and I went up another 400,000 places. As I looked over my monthly stats, I started to get suspicious. A 10% rise in traffic equated to a 400,000 rise in the Alexa charts (and the higher you get the more competative it gets). Either all the competing sites were doing really badly or there was more to this than meets the eye.

I twigged what had happened: I'd installed the Alexa toolbar on the browser I was using for testing my own website. The penny dropped. I'd been visiting my own website and getting it up the Alexa chart.

My point was later proved when working on a new webiste for a client. I reigstered the domain and spent a weekend developing the site. Hey presto, next Alexa update a site that only I knew about and visited had made it into the top 600,000! This proves not only how few people use the toolbar but the tracking isn't savvy enough to distinguish visits from hits.

The lesson is to take a huge amount of salt with your Alexa traffic rank. It's sad that some advertising programmes still use Alexa traffic rank as a factor for pricing advertising space. It's a shame, the idea of having a global popularity chart is great but for now it's just a pipe dream.