This post has been generated by several conversations I’ve had recently on LinkedIn, email and face to face with clients. It seems that many people are being told that their site is not important (or has improved in importance) due to their Alexa ranking.
Now then, if you have never heard of Alexa and don’t know how it works it can sound very impressive that the SEO on your site has increased your ranking and that your site is now in the top million in the world, “gosh, that SEO firm must be doing their job well to have made my site that popular” probably springs to mind.
However… The Alexa ranking is calculated by the visits from people that have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser – this tends to be people that are interested in SEO so is a self fulfilling prophesy, the ordinary visitor is unlikely to have this installed so won’t be counted.
To test this theory out I installed the toolbar on one of my browsers (one that I don’t use for surfing the net usually so that I was able to control things a little more) and ran a test where I visited a site two or three times a day over the course of several weeks.
The results? The world-wide rankings went from 1,273,080 to 697,776 and the UK rankings went from 129,040 to 34,930. At the same time the search engine rankings for the page I visited didn’t change and neither did the number of visitors to the page (to any noticeable level that is). The table below shows the results on a daily basis :
| Date | World Wide | Alexa UK | W.W. Movement | UK Movement |
| 04-Apr | 1,273,080 | 129,040 | ||
| 05-Apr | 1,250,123 | 128,402 | 22,957 | 638 |
| 06-Apr | 1,238,197 | 122,915 | 11,926 | 5,487 |
| 07-Apr | 1,185,298 | 98,401 | 52,899 | 24,514 |
| 11-Apr | 1,042,544 | 64,939 | 142,754 | 33,462 |
| 12-Apr | 1,074,324 | 64,635 | -31,780 | 304 |
| 13-Apr | 995,962 | 52,514 | 78,362 | 12,121 |
| 14-Apr | 988,919 | 50,960 | 7,043 | 1,554 |
| 15-Apr | 945,496 | 44,323 | 43,423 | 6,637 |
| 16-Apr | 931,384 | 40,647 | 14,112 | 3,676 |
| 17-Apr | 908,283 | 38,114 | 23,101 | 2,533 |
| 18-Apr | 926,593 | 37,882 | -18,310 | 232 |
| 19-Apr | 926,593 | 37,882 | ||
| 20-Apr | 895,277 | 34,672 | 31,316 | 3,210 |
| 21-Apr | 850,428 | 31,733 | 44,849 | 2,939 |
| 25-Apr | 836,591 | 30,900 | 13,837 | 833 |
| 26-Apr | 836,591 | 30,900 | 0 | 0 |
| 27-Apr | 814,083 | 31,925 | 22,508 | -1,025 |
| 28-Apr | 814,083 | 31,925 | 0 | 0 |
| 29-Apr | 785,013 | 28,320 | 29,070 | 3,605 |
| 03-May | 782,875 | 26,478 | 2,138 | 1,842 |
| 04-May | 788,107 | 26,535 | -5,232 | -57 |
| 06-May | 756,804 | 23,852 | 31,303 | 2,683 |
| 09-May | 731,439 | 26,319 | 25,365 | -2,467 |
| 10-May | 745,557 | 27,679 | -14,118 | -1,360 |
| 11-May | 735,630 | 26,295 | 9,927 | 1,384 |
| 13-May | 735,603 | 26,295 | 27 | 0 |
| 14-May | 716,033 | 29,237 | 19,570 | -2,942 |
| 17-May | 697,776 | 34,930 | 18,257 | -5,693 |
| 18-May | 698,719 | 35,072 | -943 | -142 |
You will notice that some of the days have better changes than other and on other days the figures actually went the wrong way (upwards). Those are the days when I either didn’t look at the site or only looked at it once.
So… to answer the question posed at the top of this article – “how important are Alexa rankings?” Personally I would not worry too much about them, if a single person looking at a site with the browser toolbar installed can improve world-wide rankings by almost 100% and UK rankings by almost 400% over the course of a few weeks imagine what would happen if you had a team of people visiting that site with the toolbar installed !