Alexa is an Amazon owned company that is famous for its public transit service ranking by alexa.com website. guides promoting websites often make a big deal about how to improve your Alexa ranking for a higher position is often associated with high profits. As a new webmaster, you must understand some very important points about the Alexa service. This article will explain what the data collected by Alexa half and then describe why you should care or not.

There are three numbers that Alexa reports, reach, page views and overall ranking. Reach refers to the percentage of all web users who have visited your site. Alexa reports this number as "reach for millions of users." For example, if Alexa reports a range of one, means that on average below one million Internet users visiting your site. Page views simply measures the average number of pages a surfer, when examined on its website. Sites with a lot of content and target visitors tend to generate more page views. The Alexa ranking general is a combination of scope and number of pages viewed so that the larger both of them are the lowest rank of the site will, by Alexa, a smaller range indicates a site more important. Alexa reports these numbers for each day a week and a half to three months and global change in a period of three months. So how Alexa gather this data?

On a daily basis, Alexa collects statistics on the number of visitors and page views for each website on the internet. In fact, no data from all sites. You see, the collection of data passes through the surfers who have downloaded and installed the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer browser. When a user visits and explore a site, the toolbar sends this information to Alexa servers. What this means for webmasters is that only the sites visited by users who have chosen to install the toolbar will actually have the data collected by them. Moreover, since only a smaller subset of all Internet users can actually use the toolbar, the ranking is a statistical average is not necessarily a true indication of the quality and readership of a site. In fact, the number is wildly inaccurate for sites with a small number of visitors and Alexa admits that this is true for sites that are not in the top 100,000.

To make matters worse, the toolbar is available for Internet Explorer. Of course, IE is the browser used by most Internet users with data showing that is used by about 83% of them (onestat.com). This is not a problem unless your audience is more likely than the other 17% of Internet users, ie those who prefer to use Firefox, Safari, Opera or another alternative browser. For example, slashdot. org is a technology news site with an audience that is known to be very anti-Microsoft, Slashdot's motto is "News for nerds. What matters." One expects that the majority of their users using any browser other than Internet Explorer and, in fact, was published recently that an estimated 65% of the readers of Slashdot is to use a browser other than IE. As of this writing (July 12, 2006), classification Slashdot was 176 with a range of 5,450 per million Internet users. Slashdot is known for something called the "Slashdot effect", ie when a report on the links on the first page of a site that receives many visitors that servers are often not able to handle the traffic surge. In other words, I expect the Alexa rank is really an underestimate of true range Slashdot.

From the standpoint of statistics, Alexa rank can not be thought of as a statistical measure fair. The sample of people used by Alexa to the collection of data is a selected at random but is biased toward users of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer, as well as those who are willing to install the toolbar and file information Alexa on their browsing behavior. If your audience is similar to Slashdot then do not expect accurate results. Anticipate the same if your audience includes people who are pro-privacy and will never install a toolbar that calls your home making your surfing behavior known to a large corporation.

Therefore, if you really want accuracy in the number of site users and page views, then it is best to use analysis software, such as Google Analytics, instead of Alexa. However, many advertisers use Alexa rankings as a neutral third party estimate of the popularity of a site but ask Alexa to determine the amount of advertising space is worth it in place. This is the reason why many webmasters show their Alexa ranking on the first page. If you happen to be at the upper end Alexa ranking, then you should be able to benefit from it, and if you are not, then you probably should not lose too much sleep. Focus on adding new content to your site, so you will be able to attract more traffic to your site through major search engines and also keep your visitors coming back.