There is an ongoing debate amongst webmasters on the importance of Alexa rankings. Many believe that it is not important and can be easily influenced or a possible flaw in its algorithm exists. For example, if you register a new website and pay for incoming traffic the Alexa ranking of your website will increase and can easily mislead people into thinking that you are receiving traffic.
In some cases, domain resellers use this in bad faith to sell their newly acquired domains and fraudulently convince buyers that the domain is naturally receiving type-in traffic.
On the other hand, other webmasters and domainers believe in the significance of Alexa rankings. Provided that no means is used to artificially inflate traffic entering websites, then there is some indication that the site is receiving a good number of visitors.
As a webmaster myself, I am somewhat on the fence. I don’t really care much about the Alexa rankings of my numerous websites. But in all honesty, I do use it so surely it is somewhat useful. For example, on my previous post where I mentioned that this blog has entered the top 1 million websites in terms of visitor numbers. This is also visible on Google Analytics, where there is a gradual increase in the number of visitors every week.
The exact ranking on Alexa, is not that important to me but an increase in ranking is good news. It shows that the new posts and internal SEO through keywords on my entries is working and affects the number of visitors I am receiving.
That said, it’s easy to influence the Alexa ranking if your site is within the top 1 million. But as you move closer and closer to the top spot which is currently being held by Google.com, and then the second spot which is Facebook there is a lot of accuracy there, Google.com being the most visited website, followed by Facebook.
Additionally, if your website holds a relatively high spot on the rankings, e.g. #1000 for example, this is quite impressive and you get to sell more adverts because advertisers can guess the approximate number of visitors you receive daily.
So all in all, Alexa ranking might not carry enough weight to random website visitors, while it carries some weight to advertisers. So is it important? Depends on who you are and if it can be used to your advantage. But if you know what it is, surely we must admit that it’s pretty impressive to have a site on the top 500? These sites earn big.
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WYSIWYG! I'm a simple person trying to live the simplest life possible - it seems to be the most difficult thing to achieve! I'm an internet enthusiast and I've been a webmaster since early 2007. I like: blogging, developing sites using open source software, social media, computer games, '80s music, comedy & horror, animals, crunching on M&Ms peanut and Smarties!
