Quite a few people have been commenting recently that despite their visitor numbers increasing, their Alexa rank is actually getting worse, i.e. the number is increasing. I can certainly vouch for this, because even though all 3 of my blogs have shown increased traffic in the last 3 months, including some large Stumble Upon spikes, their Alexa rank has steadily deteriorated with this blog going from 60K to 80K, and one of my others going from 120k to 200k despite doubling it’s traffic in that period.

A Victim Of Your Own Success?

I wonder if this has been caused by a couple of related things:

  1. We’ve been too successful in encouraging people to use the Alexa toolbar, Search Status extension etc. in order to help our Alexa ranks.
  2. Alexa finally released a toolbar for FireFox users.

Why would this be a problem?

Because as I understand it, the Alexa ranking is a relative score, supposedly indicating the popularity of your website relative to others which are visited by Alexa users. For example, my current Alexa ranking suggests that Blog-Op is something like the eighty thousandth most popular web site on the internet, which although flattering, is highly unlikely. This obviously means that there are many hundreds, if not thousands of websites out there with better traffic than mine, which are not being ranked by Alexa. However, if more people start using the Alexa toolbar, then the likelihood of these unranked websites being visited and subsequently included becomes much higher.

Whoops

In other words, the more people using the Alexa toolbar, the more accurate their data, and the more likely your site is to move the wrong way (for you) in the rankings.

So it looks like those of us who encouraged the use of Alexa have shot ourselves in the foot.

Bugger.