March 25th, 2010 by Nick

We have discussed PageRank and TrustRank, which are SEO metrics based on the link structure of a given network of websites. Alexa Rank works differently and provides some other information about how well your site is doing. It’s appearing more frequently around the web and on search engine optimization discussion forums. What’s more, you can even check a site’s Alexa Rank on our free SEO tools page.

So, what is it and what does it measure? Rather than measuring the power and authority of various links and building a metric out of that like PageRank does, Alexa Rank is based on traffic. Until recently it was based solely on the wanderings and behaviour of Alexa Toolbar users. Like Google and Yahoo Toolbars, the Alexa Toolbar is a browser add on that provides shortcuts to various services. It collects information along the way. In addition to a pop-up ad blocker and a normal search entry window, the Alexa Toolbar shows the Alexa Ranking of the site you happen to be on at the time. So wherever you go, Alexa is both measuring rankings and displaying them to help you assess site quality and also collecting data about which sites you browse. The information is fed back into the Alexa Ranking algorithm.

Exactly how many people are using the Alexa Toolbar isn’t known. More than 10 million downloads have been made, but not all those people are necessarily using the toolbar in their everyday browsing. Still, even if the true usage figure is a very conservative 1 million, that’s a lot of people moving around and generating usage data. Toolbar users may not be fully representative of the average internet user, so Alexa Rank is not the perfect measure of site traffic, but it is useful SEO knowledge nonetheless.

More recently Alexa has started to use traffic information from sources apart from its own toolbar users, although what those sources are is less clear. Perhaps for legal reasons, Alexa is keeping quiet on the subject. It is common knowledge that Amazon purchased Alexa Internet for a staggering sum and there is a link to Amazon on every Alexa Toolbar. We know that Alexa Internet is certainly a big enough player to have access to rich traffic data sources.

But never mind about the details. What we really need to know is that Alexa Rank is a pretty decent metric of site traffic. Let’s play with it a bit. Remember it’s a ranking, so low numbers are good. Our SEO company site http://www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk/ currently has an Alexa Rank of 336,426. Not too bad, it’s a big internet out there and this site is pretty new. Now, what about a bigger one. Wikipedia.org has an Alexa Rank of 6. As we’d expect, that’s a brilliant ranking.

The SEO tools we provide are easy to use. Just pop the url in the box and away you go. Check out your site’s Alexa Ranking, but don’t stop there. Do a little bit of analysis on your competitors too, and find out who is getting the traffic in your field.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.