What is Alexa?

Alexa is a service from amazon.com that proposes to audit the traffic received by millions of sites over the internet, over periods of 3 to 6 months statistics. To do so, Alexa counts unique visitors on the main page along a single day period, and then attribute a rank to the site based exclusively on that count. The lower the site rank is, the better classified is the site. Obviously on top positions you will see sites like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. Curiously Chinese sites have appeared recently on top positions like qq.com reaching top 10 in Alexa with users coming at 97% from China. A sign of times!

How important is Alexa?

Alexa would be an interesting tool, if this classification was obtained after counting every single unique visit received by a site. In fact, Alexa only counts visits from users that have installed the Alexa toolbar on their browser, meaning that Alexa ranking is made only from a very small sample audience. Very few have the Alexa toolbar installed, so there might be millíons of Web sites that, even if they have a lot of traffíc, will not be ranked.

The audience itself is not distributed by any criteria (age, location, professional background...). There is just a simple and not very probing inquiry while installing the component onto your browser. Everybody who wants the Alexa toolbar can get it, and the results gathered by Alexa are only the visits made by those users. I believe that, since Alexa toolbar offers SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services and tools, most owners of sites have Alexa toobar installed. The interest of getting the Alexa toolbar for a classical user of the web is questionable.

For instance, my wife has a very popular site in Russian language with more than 200000 hits per month and receives a very lousy classification in Alexa. I do not receive a tenth of these visits in my site, but my classification is 10 times better than hers. The difference is that my site is in English and Alexa is very english users driven. For instance, if qq.com was written in english and used by americans, then maybe it would reach number one position in Alexa, in front of Google!

Unfortunately, what shines often catch the eye, and a good classification in Alexa is often synonym of site with high traffic. That might be true, because stats gathered by Alexa are only a sample of what is happening in reality. The contrary is however not true. A site with a bad Alexa rank can't drive to any kind of conclusion.

Conclusion

If the main idea of Alexa was interesting, the lack of targeted audience reveals itself as a misleading instrument to analyse the data produced by it. I would recommend using it only as indication tool that should be combined to other to lead your SEO strategy. If your site is in a different language than english, then you might not consider important the rank given by Alexa.