what does alexa page rank actually mean?

mistrymit · 06-10-07

what does this page rank mean?

my page rank for one webiste has jumped from 2.7m to about 1.7m now, and another has jumped from 9.5 m to about 5.7m,

but what does that mean?

sgpratley · 06-10-07

Alexa rank is where your site is judged to rank out of all the busiest sites in the world based on the volume of traffic it gets.

The site with most traffic (Probably google.com) is #1, then down from there.
It's worked out by tracking traffic on people who have downloaded the Alexa toolbar so it's a fairly small sample and at the lower end (1million or more) jumps about a huge amount.

When you get above about 30K it gets a bit more reliable.

It's mildly useful if you have a big list of sites to contact for deals and want to prioritise your efforts on the big ones, but don't base any decisions entirely on it.

Hope that helps

Stuart · 06-10-07

Sorry to steal the thread...

Ok, I know alexa most of the time is not worth looking at, but if I looked at a graph for traffic to a web site, could I get an idea of how many uniques a month this site receives. I appreciate that many people including the owners may have the toolbar installed and I know this can affect the traffic and graph?

Thanks
Stuart

Bud · 06-10-07

I don't know if this helps....

One of my sites had an Alexa rank hovering around 300,000 through Sept, with both 'reach' and 'page views' in the top 100,000.

That site had 1546 uniques that month.

Another, had a rank around 2,350,000 in Sept. Not ranked for 'reach' and 'page views'.

That had 4152 uniques.

Yet another had a rank around 2,400,000 in Sept. Not ranked for 'reach' and 'page views'.

That had 642 uniques.

Finally, to bring in Google PR (sigh), another long standing site I've got has a Google PR 4 and was not ranked at all in Alexa through Sept, with 620 uniques.

So, to agree with Stephen, I'm not sure Alexa really means much at the lower levels.

I'll let you know when I'm in the top 30,000!

sgpratley · 06-10-07

Hi Stuart,

You can't tell uniques, it's a relative, rather than an absolute measure if that means anything. It tells you if you are bigger than another site, but not by how much.

I've seen a couple of sites with a ranking of around 25-30K that I know are about 1million pageviews a month. How that translates into uniques is anyone's guess.

1 million views on as site without much repeat custom, like a high end electricals store is a lot of uniques. 1 million views on Facebook where a lot of people go every day and spend a lot of time, wouldn't be many uniques.

If you want to benchmark the top end, you could compare some audited sites via ABCe with their pagerank maybe?

mistrymit · 06-10-07

the jump in rank is still a good thing right???

mainlime · 06-10-07

Alexa is a waste of time. It only samples people who have the Alexa toolbar installed which is far from a representative sample. Especially at the low traffic volume end one or two visitors with the toolbar installed can change your ranking by enormous amounts eg several hundred thousand places.

sgpratley · 06-10-07

At the numbers you're looking at I wouldn't say it's good or bad, like mainlime says it's vey easy to influence at that level.

I wouldn't totally write it off though, if 2 people say they have a user base of 250,000 members to advertise to, one has a rank of 15K and the other have a rank of 2million, I know which one I'd be talking to.

You are talking about pretty vast margins of error though, interpreting the numbers is more art than science.

Stuart · 06-10-07

Hi,

Yes it helps, what I was trying to work out was:

I know a friends site has x visitors a month and I also know what he earns from the site. I then wanted to look at a different site and estimate what the monthly uniques and earnings might be...based on comparing the 2 graphs

I am writing a business plan to raise investment, as part of this I wanted to show 2 graphs from alexa, one of my friends site and one example of another site, then under the graphs show what the estimated uniques are.

Obviously I don't have access to the real stats of the 2 web sites as I don't own them, this would be a real help to me for the investor I am meeting with who's not really net savvy

Here is the graph showing the 2 sites "removed the names" of the sites

So I know that when the site with the lesser amount was at its peak, it had about 9,000 uniques a day.

Could I just for this exercise say that the site with the higher amount is around 10 x what the site with the lesser amount?

Cheers
Stuart

sgpratley · 07-10-07

As it's a ranking, you can't say how much bigger one site is than another.
That's be like saying that #1 in the Premiership is twice as good as #2 (please don't turn this into a footy thread!)

Only way you can do that is by finding a site with a similar ranking and finding out what they get.
Some sites will advertise their traffic figures if they sell advertising so that's probably a good place to start.

mistrymit · 07-10-07

what about google page rank is that something similar to alexa?

sgpratley · 07-10-07

Completely different, google's pagerank is a measure of how 'popular' the site is in terms of links. So a site with little traffic but which is linked to a lot might get a good pagerank.

It tends to happen with very good quality niche sites