Is Alexa.org’s Ranking Remotely Relevant Anymore?

22 Oct 2007

As any SEO conscious website owner would be, I pay attention to a myriad of sources that provide feedback on my website’s performance. One source that I follow is Alexa.org. I follow this website’s rating of my website regularly and it’s interesting to see the trends.

My ranking with Google, Technorati, etc., continues to rise. Somehow my Alexa.org ranking continues to fall. I had at one time broken the top 100,000 and these days I am floating somewhere around 800,000. My website traffic is at least 4x what it was when I was at 100,000 and my links incoming are much much higher.

The only reason this bothers me is that some search engines and SEO tools still heavily weight the Alexa.org ranking. The problem is the only way to improve your page rank on Alexa is to increase the amount of users who visit your page using the Alexa toolbar in their browser.

As my readers get more savvy and in general my readers are quite technical, these guys would never use this toolbar. So while I may have a poor ranking among a possibly relatively technically illiterate group, the tool doesn’t rank my amount of users or the quality of those users at all.

So the questions is, is Alexa.org still relevant? I would say possibly so for very wide general use websites. I would say no and increasingly less so for everyone. I don’t have numbers to back it up, but I am betting the Alexa toolbar’s saturation is declining, not increasing.

Is it time that major SEO ratings ditch Alexa? I think so.

Submit this post to