Alexa Rank Update Problem and Workaround
Ajith | Jan 2009 | How Do I?, Site Promotion, SEO
Most of you must have noticed that your Alexa rank widgets and toolbar data are not getting updated for the past three weeks or so. Even the Alexa website’s traffic details query is showing data that was frozen three weeks ago. As it seems, Alexa is doing another upgrade to their ranking algorithm, just like they did in April 2008.
There is a work around available, if you are so keen on knowing your latest Alexa rank, at least until the toolbar and widgets start displaying new ranks. It takes a couple of minutes but worth the wait, if Alexa rank matters so much to you.
Get your latest Alexa Rank
The only updated rank data, that is available right now (using the new algorithm?) publicly, is their Top 1 million sites list. This is available for download as a Comma-Separated-Values (CSV) file in zipped format and can be found in the following location.
Alexa Top 1,000,000 Sites.
Once downloaded and unzipped, it can be opened in your favorite text editor or even Wordpad. It will not open in Microsoft Excel because Excel supports only 64K rows and this file contain 1 Million! Now search for your domain name in this file and get your latest rank that is updated on a daily basis. This works for only those who are ranked up to 1 million (Others need to wait)
Should a great Alexa rank be one of your goals?
A lot of bloggers have set their 2009 objectives and goals in the past two weeks and I read in many blogs that the Alexa rank is one of their prime objectives. Please note that, the Alexa rank may not be the right criterion to assess your traffic size & quality. For that matter even Compete or other alternatives are not good enough either.
If you want to impress your stake holders (sponsors, advertisers, readers, potential buyers etc) with some realistic traffic data, share your Google Analytics or similar tracker data that can provide better KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as bounce rate, new v/s returning visitors, page views per visit, demographic data, visitor entry/exit pattern etc. However, raw data analysis tools such as awstats, webalyzer etc are not of any use either.
How can Amazon improve Alexa?
If they really want to improve Alexa ranking algorithm and its acceptance, they should make a little more disclosures about the data received on the website being ranked. i.e. Sources for collecting data, the number of visits and page views, sampling done etc. If not, it will remain a fictitious measure over which you keep brooding over.
Over to you…
- Do you believe in the current ranking systems and Alexa in particular?
- Is a particular Alexa rank one of your goals for 2009?
I honestly don’t know much about the Alexa algorithm, but it seems like it’s pretty easy to manipulate if you have a site that a lot of tech-savy people visit since they use the Alexa plugin.
Anyway, it is in my goals and from that top 1,000,000 list im almost their
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Hi Ajith. Wanted to let you know about a free web based tool I just wrote
which allows you to search the Alexa Top million sites online without
downloading the 10+ meg CSV file.
The URL is http://www.popularity.info and you can enter any domain
or partial keyword to check daily Alexa rank.
The tool is still in beta mode, but should be updating daily as of early next week.
Thanks and please feel free to let me know any comments or suggestions you might have.
As we all know, Alexa gives priority to visits from browsers that have their toolbar installed. Even a new website, with two or three visits from Alexa toolbar installed browsers can prop up your rank near the 2 millionth mark.
Refreshing your browser continuously and sending bot traffic to the site are some ways people use to manipulate their Alexa Rank.
While I agree that Alexa is not the best way to measure your traffic stats, nevertheless, it is still a good comparative tool if you do not “cheat” your way up. For me, personally, Alexa ranking is something on which I live by, comparing my traffic campaign progress.
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@Barry, your Alexa popularity service is really good
The problem is that when we write such an application you need to store this 10MB file into your local DB right? Looks like you haven’t been keeping it updated. Could be a beta issue…
Why don’t you write a cron job to keep it updated on your database on a regular basis? That will make this tool perfect (In fact, I have been thinking of writing one
to accompany this post. Now that you have one, you just need to fix the issues and we all will use it.
@Ardit, good luck with your traffic goals…
@Forsaken, you are right! The system of collecting data from toolbar may be wrong. They should ideally get these data from some consortium of ISPs or something like that. Do you believe in compete.com ranks? I guess, though they have a toolbar as well, it cannot be manipulated
As soon as I finished this post, my Alexa toolbar is showing the updated rank
But still the 1 million sites file is more accurate and updated!
I dont really consider Alexa as a real value to know if a blog id popular for the simple reason that those who have the alexa plugin on their site has an advantage over those who have not use it.
However its still one of my objective this year to get a good alexa rank. i am aiming for the below 500000 and hope to reach it by April.
Yeah, since some weeks, I see my alexa ranking frozen. I thought they have dumped me lol :p
So I’ll be waiting for my new rank.
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@Ajith, Yep, I noticed the Toolbar Rank updated, but it is way off the rank shown in the attached file.
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Yeh, the Alexa rank just got updated today. And we all know that Alexa isn’t a true indicator of success. However, it is one of those things that bloggers are often concerned about. After all, website value is often judged using Alexa as a principal factor. It will be interesting to see how rankings are adjusted based on the new algorithm… I am growing nervous.
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From what I remember, sometime last year around April I think, Alexa has updated their algorithm and is no longer based on traffic from people with Alexa toolbar. This is also the reason why almost all sites have experienced Alexa rankings drop during those times (even John Chow has a post about this sudden drop), it is because the rankings has to be adjusted with the new algorithm based on traffic coming from general internet population.
Please google it and correct me if I’m wrong. I was on-and-off from the internet last year so I was not really getting updates on time.
Ya i also have problem from alexa and google.
I’m not to fussed about alexa rank, but other people are, so keeping it at a good value is useful…Currently im round 200k Hopefully will get it down to 100k by the end of the year.
maybe they are updating their bugs. I can see so many bugs with Alexa!
omg, i downloaded the link you provided, i’m now included on the top 1 million my rank is now 723,474, but the Alexa displaying is only 1,8M!
Alexa is a crap but anyway its still nice to feel about having an Alexa rank below a 100,000. My blog used to be almost there and all of a sudden it went up to 200,000+ and i dont have an idea why…
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open and look at 1,000,000 Sites list I think it’s wasting time. Cuase I don’t really care about my alexa rank, my main target is sell my affiliate by raising my traffic if there is visitor I’m really sure my alexa rank will update too.
Melvin, labeling something as “crap” and then expecting to get nice results out of that “crap” does not make sense. Of course, Alexa rankings are not perfect. But still no company would just design anything with the intention to make it “crap”. Amazon is doing its best to tweak the Alexa algorithms and the least we can do is appreciate that there exist some mechanism that offers a brief comparative tool to judge our progress in the cyberspace with all other websites.
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I don’t know why my alexa ranking is stuck on.Its not changing at all .I wonder what is ths problem.
Nice find buddy. But i dont care much about Alexa these days. I hope they come up with a better algorithm
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Alexa rank doesn’t even matter too much. Bloggers will make a big deal about the new algorithm, then just like last time, they’ll realize they have a crappy system that doesnt work.
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Alexa rank has been one of the key gauge for potential advertisers of a blog since they do not have access to our stats tracking account. Thus, I think there is still value for looking closely at our Alexa rank should we want to monetize our sites through private ad sales.
Wei Liang
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@Kurt, yep it may not be accurate and it can be manipulated. But at the same time, a lot fo people – including sponsors and advertisers – still use it and consider it as a shortlisting mechanism.
@Shirley, I guess it is not having a major impact on blogs this time, unlike the update in April last year. You can keep your cool
Alexa is more like getting those CMM or SEI standards. Big companies don’t bother about it much but mid size and upcoming ones need to prove their worth and potential so they care about it.
@Frenchy, you are right… as I mentioned in the comment above, I don’t see a much bigger impact this time.
@Donace, 9 out of 10 say they don’t care about it, but they are actually setting an Alexa target or goal for the year
@qarla, congrats on getting into the top million blogs!
@Melvin, please check your reach values. With the same amount of traffic if people are viewing more pages per visit, your Alexa rank will be going up. That’s the reason why my Alexa rank is higher than some of the bigger and better blogs in this niche.
@Dewaji, this was mainly a work around for those who were impatiently waiting for seeing their next ranks… Experienced people like you may not bother about it as much as an upcoming blogger does.
@Forsaken, you are right. Amazon invested in Alexa and maintaining it as well to make sure that some kind of information is available about all websites in this world in terms of its reach and traffic. They are improving it continuosly but as we all know it can be hacked as well. So even if it’s ‘crap’ until a proper replacement is found, we may still use it
@Harish, that’s exactly what we discussed in this post
@Madhur, thanks man… In fact, the more experienced you get the lesser focussed you are on these ranks, right?
@Niche, well… partly right. As I mentioned above, unless a proper replacement is available, the current crap may be useful to many
@Felix, exactly – Your advertisers and sponsors first go by certain open metrics that are available – such as Alexa, Feedcount, Technorati etc. Only after that shortlisting process they may go after detailed server statistics and tracker results such as GA.
Thanks everyone for your views. I have been busy with a couple of other things that I had to reply a day late. Sorry for that…
Yeh, people who have a ‘decent’ rank generally talk about how unimportant it is. lol. But when I was in the millions, I definitely did all I could to lower my rank.
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I have used alexa site to check mostly other sites traffic. I have never concentrated on that. Is alexa ranking a good pointer? Does advertisers use this to guage the sites traffic?
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@Shirley, haha that’s a general tendency right? Mostly people forget where they came from. On the other hand, sometimes those who never get good ranks claim that they don’t bother about it. I have read it a thousand times on forums – especially on the PR matter… Reminds me of the Aesope’s fox-grape story
@Nihar, well if you are not exposing the GA stats to advertisers they go by Alexa or compete… Once they give you ads, they could then monitor click throughs etc. But Alexa still has ‘some’ amount of acceptance.
I didn’t notice that it hadn’t updated
Maybe I thought my rank had stayed exactly the same. I agree with Shirley – when you have a good rank it’s not big deal but when you don’t have a good rank you do everything you can to reduce it.
Great find with the csv file.
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@Kim,
good to know that your homepage rank is back to original after a little hide n seek…Wrong reply, mistook it for PR and thought about your PR issues in the recent past…You are right Kim, people tend to stop thinking about ranks once they are up there
yeah its a problem with the alexa toolbar. but for me i am not going into deep when it comes to alexa. for my all other sites rightnow i mainly concentrate on the content because content will surely bring visitors and that will automatically boost your rank in alexa or any other site. what say Ajith?
@SkyXavier, you are right… Good content will fetch in traffic, subscribers and ranks… The idea of this post was to share the interim arrangement before the Alexa updated ranks start appearing.
Reply from Alexa support team arrive yesterday…
I have proof that alexa is reporting a lot but not the truth. Constantly raising GoogleAnalytics. Same thing for StatPress and even mint. Alexa drops down 40k today!
Ok it might be that the whole web received more traffic in the last 2 months but i don’t believe in that, sorry. Why on earth doesn’t Google have a tool like this. They are in the know of almost everything!
@tim, of course it’s no perfect solution. However, you understand how Alexa works. It considers (1) total pages viewed and (2) the reach or number of pages viewed per visit. and this is considered on the basis of a three months average.
For example, Let us assume that site A has 10000 visits per month where as site B has 20000. If site A’s reach is say 2.5 and site B’s is 1, definitely site A has a better (i.e. lower) Alexa rank!
And, Alexa is a service by Amazon not Google
Probably if more an more people start using Google Toolbar or Google Analytics they will be able to come up with a traffic ranking system as well.
Hello ,
My site’s Alexa Rank has also frozen from the last 4-5 days…
My site rank within alexa remains the same; this is since its very start? our Google pr is rising, but alexa is not even shows backlinks/ any advice, please?
Alexa ranking is mainly based on two parameters:
- Page hits
- Reach (i.e. number of pages per visit)
Unless you improve the second part (that is the reach) alexa rank won’t improve. As much as possible you should get the reader to visit one more page than the landing page at least
Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other, diverse sources over a rolling 3 month period.
A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.
Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day.
Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site.
However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview.
Therefore, if someone wants to boost his alexa rank, he must increase his technology oriented visitors base (webmasters, technology geeks etc.), because these are the people who most probably have the alexa toolbar installed….
Rank is frozen yet again, starting Friday of last week. It would be nice if they updated their blog to let people know what they are doing. But we were pleasantly surprised when we saw our rankings shoot up 200k when we got the Top 1 million sites spreadsheet! Awesome!
There are individuals and companies that do make alexa ranking some sort of a reference point. Well, maybe their are considering it as an “estimate”. Anyway, nice discussion. I really got something. Thanks!
Alexa ranking does not even count. If you want to get better Alexa rank, you can simply install the Toolbar and refresh your website as much as you can and you’ll see a major change in your Alexa rank. A better way to check on your Traffic Data/Size is using Google Analytics.
Thanks
i have over 9k pageview perday but my alexa ranking is too high … why they don’t update their system