I was reading about an Alexa experiment on Connected Internet He is trying to see if he can increase his blog’s Alexa ranking. It made me wonder what Alexa Page Ranking was and whether I even cared what mine is.
In doing a little research, Alexa says:
“About the Alexa Traffic Rankings
A listing of all sites on the Web, sorted by traffic…
Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.
What is Traffic Rank?
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.”
Well, the second question is do I care? If you are trying to make money blogging, you should care. Your Alexa ranking will determine which advertisers will pay you and how much they will pay you. Many of the ad networks such as text-link ads and review me pay according to your alexa rating.
The lower your number the more popular your website. For instance on this day, Achingdebts.blogspot.com has a traffic rank of: 7,902,243. Just for the record, that’s not the number of visitors. 
You can check your own Alexa Ranking. Blogspot.com has a ranking of 12 so you have to dig a little deeper if you have a blog on blogger or wordpress.com.
Some thoughts about Alexa in general. Apparently Alexa only indexes visits to your website by browsers that have either the Alexa toolbar for ie or the new firefox extension Search Status. I guess I must be falling behind because I had no idea that these were available. My question is how many millions of people are like me and how reliable is Alexa’s data.
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