Explanations

How Does Your Site Rank?

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There are two main ways websites are compared and ranked and each of them has problems, but nonetheless, have become the ’standard’ measurement tools. The first is Alexa ranking and the second is Google PageRank.

Today I want to introduce you to your Alexa ranking. What the heck is that? Well, it’s a popularity rank from the most popular site on the web on down. Today on the Global Top 500 list, #1 is Yahoo.com. That’s out of all the websites on the Internet. When you look at just websites from the U.S., Google.com beats out Yahoo.com and pushes it down a notch to #2. But if you look at all English language websites on the net, Yahoo.com goes back up to #1 and Google.com is #2.

Used to be, Alexa collected all their data from the use of their Alexa toolbar. If you haven’t heard of Alexa, then you probably haven’t downloaded their toolbar, and hence, all your Internet activity has not been incorporated into the data Alexa uses to determine popularity rank. See the flaw? Yeah, the data is collected from a severely small subset of Internet users…mostly geeky types (like me) who own websites and want to track these kinds of stats for their own sites. This data kinda leaves Average Joe User out of the equation, which has been the biggest beef people have had with Alexa Rankings…and rightly so.

Last week, however, Alexa announced that they are going to begin to include data sources apart from their toolbar and the data they collect through installation and use of it. That’s really good news! They’re going to start using data from a much wider base of Internet users, so the Alexa Ranking is going to get closer to being what it says it is: an indication of the popularity of your website as compared to other websites on the ‘Net.

So…do you know your site’s Alexa rank? Go check it out…it might be better than you think!

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