I was talking to one of my friend who is also a budding entrepreneur about web marketing strategies. He told me about Alexa rankings (www.alexa.com) and said that he looks at those ranking before deciding to advertise on a website. I was curious to know about my own ranking on Alexa but not to propose this blog for advertising to generate revenue.

I went to Alexa and searched for my website detail and was amazed to know Alexa had information about it. My ranking was – 21,863,014 worldwide!

My google analytics reports suggests that I have lot of traffic from search engines and other websites and some direct traffic as well. But Alexa had a kind of different information about my website. I researched on how Alexa monitors the web traffic and what are the parameters that it considers while ranking the websites. Here are the findings -

- Alexa monitors traffic through its toolbar. If a visitor of your website has an Alexa toolbar installed in his browser, s/he will be recorded as a visitor in Alexa’s system.
- Alexa also monitors traffic through various Alexa widgets that you can place on your websites. A visitor curious enough to click on any of those widgets, sends information to Alexa’s system.
- Alexa consolidates the traffic of 3 months period and ranks the websites accordingly.

I went on to download the Alexa toolbar and only to find that I cannot because I was using Google Chrome and Alexa does not support it. This made me think and investigate what percentage of my visitors are using Gogole Chrome. I went back and check my analytics report for a year and found that I have around 1900 visitors to this blog every month and following is the statistics for major three browsers –

Firefox (873) 45.54%
Internet Explorer (660) 34.43%
Chrome (293) 15.28%

So I have lost around 15% visitors to register their presence on Alexa so straight! Going further, I asked all my very internet savvy friends (a sample of 450 people) around the globe if they use Alexa toolbar. The findings were shocking -

- Never heard of it – 62%
- I know what the toolbar is but have not used it – 23%
- I have it installed in a browser that I do not use – 10%
- I regularly use the browser that has Alexa toolbar – 5%

Now we can imagine how many people do use Alexa toolbar. Considering above statistics, can we trust on the Alexa ranking. I choose not to.

Further to this, I decided to experiment a little. I am able to drastically improve my alexa ranking in a period of 20 days. I will tell you how in my next post.

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