How Accurate are Alexa stats for traffic
Posted on May 17, 2011 by
Paul White
Alexa has been around for a long time, these days many people tend to judge a site's worth by its alexa ranking. But the question is how accurate is Alexa's traffic stats? Since I do have my own server with over 40 sites, I have access to the traffic patterns of various sites. So in this article I will give you the stats so you can decide how much credibility alexa's traffic rankings really deserve.
How does Alexa get their traffic stats?
They get it from several factors. The first is they have a browser toolbar that tracks the browsing habits of people as they browse the web. This data is compiled by Alexa to determine how much traffic a website really gets. They also count the number of links pointing to other sites as you browse the web. They figure that the more links your site has the better it probably ranks and the more traffic is gets. Unfortunately only a small fraction of the USA has the Alexa toolbar installed, so their traffic stats are not a very accurate representation of the entire population's browsing habits. Alexa's rankings are based on your average daily visitors and your average daily page views for the past 3 months.
How do I lookup my website's alexa ranking?
Easy you just visit
Alexa.com, and type your domain to the search box. Alexa will then tell you your traffic rank.
How accurate is Alexa's traffic stats?
To shed some light on this I am going to pull the traffic stats from my own
websites, and then compare it to the alexa ranking. To put things into perspective, I am using SmaterStats Professional 4.0 as my stats server. The numbers I will be giving you will be based on my weblogs and not organic traffic. Also I would like to add that I have all my
websites setup with hostnames only. This means that if you type in the IP on a browser's address bar it will not pull up the site. I had a lot of problems with bot net servers hammering my sites by the IP address, ( searching for targets ). So even though these numbers will represent the weblogs there should be very little in the way of bot nets and zombie traffic represented by these numbers.
Blog.whitesites.comAlexa Rank: 424,582
SmarterStats Monthly Visitors: 26,766
SmarterStats Monthly Views: 49,426
DesirousParty.comAlexa Rank: 560,609
SmarterStats Monthly Visitors: 19,459
SmarterStats Monthly Views: 562,336
GoddessSonya.comAlexa Rank: 1,852,093
SmarterStats Monthly Visitors: 17,099
SmarterStats Monthly Views: 118,297
WheresTheStripClub.comAlexa Rank: 4,582,404
SmarterStats Monthly Visitors: 9,249
SmarterStats Monthly Views: 34,036
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