Technical Stuff

The Alexa Traffic Rank Can Be Deceiving

Posted by: buzz42 02/02.

By Tim Predaina

Running a traffic exchange on a domain that I registered in 1999, the site receives a lot of traffic by default. It seems that most webmasters and other potential members will check the Alexa traffic rank to determine if the website is receiving enough traffic to make it worthwhile to sign-up. One webmaster was kind enough to email me about Alexa saying that they showed "no data" for my site.

The problem is that Alexa can only rank traffic for a website if they are aware of the traffic. They do this by collecting the information gathered from their toolbar which is installed by visitors to their site. I consider this "spyware", but that's another issue. They admitted this in a response to a support request I sent to them about my site showing no data. This is the reply I received:

Thank you for contacting Alexa Internet.

We do currently show traffic data for checks4free.com. Because the site has a very low Reach (number of Alexa users who visit the site), the single-day rank might occasionally reflect NA meaning that no Alexa Toolbar users visited the site on a given day.

Thank you for your interest in Alexa.

Best Regards, Alexa Internet Customer Service

This means that even though the traffic exchange is getting an average of 300 visitors a day, they don't know about it unless the visitor has the Alexa Toolbar installed. Now I admit that compared to Google, 300 visitors a day is low, but it does keep the site running.

I wanted Alexa to know about "ALL" of the traffic my traffic exchange website was receiving, not just traffic from their toolbar users. I wanted them to know not because I support them, but because so many other users did and they were apparently unaware of the traffic ranking prejudice. I accomplished this by installing a hidden alexa traffic rank banner on my site. I hid the banner for two reasons. First because the ranking was so low no one would sign-up and second, because I was unwilling to advertise a service that was not providing a fair and accurate report of the website's true traffic.

The banner was hidden by setting the attribute style="display: none" . The code executes but won't display the resulting image. This works for table cells, paragraphs and other HTML tags.

Since installing the hidden code on January 15th, 2007, the traffic rank for checks4free.com had improved by over four and half million within fifteen days. That doesn't mean there was that much traffic, only that the website had moved up the list from the six millionth spot to approximately the one millionth spot.

You can check the alexa traffic rank for the Checks4Free Traffic Exchange using this URL: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=checks4free.com.

If your website has a low alexa traffic rank, I hope the suggestion in this article will help you to improve your ranking as well. It is unfortunate that webmasters are forced to give up vital visitor data on their websites in order to avoid a biased review that could potentially result in fewer customers. The help file on the alexa website talks about the biased ranking. However, to the millions of users that base an opinion about a website using the alexa traffic rank, numbers speak louder than words. Your only other option is to hope that more alexa toolbar users visit your website.

A 1992 graduate of ITT Technical Institute where he obtained his Electronic Engineering Degree, Tim Predaina started his computer career in 1986 programming on the never popular Amiga computer. Since then he has worked as a Network Engineer in the health care industry building network infrastructures and Internet connectivity for Hospitals and Medical Clinics. The Checks4Free Traffic Exchange: http://www.checks4free.com Traffic Building Information: http://emarketing.predaina.com

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