Is Alexa Important?
Alexa is a toolbar / rating system created in 1996. Acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 Million, it has grown to become a highly controversial “rating” system used by web developers, webmasters and online advertising firms.
According to the Wikipedia definition of this Amazon subsidiary, in December 2005, the company opened its search index and web-crawling facilities to third party programs through a comprehensive set of web services and APIs.
All this aside, how accurate is the Alexa score?
There is case upon case of a site’s score misrepresenting the website’s true traffic score. No one will deny that the more a site appeals to web developers (who are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed), the more skewed your rank will be. (The lower your score, the more likely you are to have higher traffic.
Here are the top 10 web sites, as rated by Alexa.
I’ve included brief descriptions of the sites (most of them you probably already use pretty often though.)
1. Google – Enables users to search the Web Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages. The company’s focus is developing search technology.
2. Facebook – A social utility that connects people A social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos.
3. YouTube – way to get your videos to the people YouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!
4. Yahoo – Personalized content and search options Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager.
5. Windows – live Search engine from Microsoft Windows Search engine from Microsoft.
6. Baidu – The leading Chinese language search engine The leading Chinese language search engine, provides “simple and reliable” search experience, strong in Chinese language and multi-media content including MP3 music and movies, the first to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile search in China.
7. Wikipedia – An online collaborative encyclopedia – An online collaborative encyclopedia.
8. Blogger.com – Free, automated web blog publishing tool Free, automated web blog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP.
9. MSN – Portal for shopping, news and money Portal for shopping, news and money, e-mail, search, and chat.
10. Twitter – Social networking and micro-blogging service Social networking and micro-blogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.
The Alexa score is just like a golf score. The lower, the better. Breaking the 100,000 ma is truly a milestone that view web developers achieve. (99% of all sites in the world are not in the top 100,000 of Alexa.) A web developer’s score becomes more accurate the lower you go.
The lower a site’s score, the more data points there are to truly “triangulate” a score.
So get out there and get cracking and be one of the few, the proud, the web developer who breaks Alexa 100,000!
