Alexa Rank

[realmccoy101]

Ok, I have a pretty good Alexa Ranking of 159K and have been online for less than a year.  What my question is why is my Alexa Ranking so much better than all of my competitors who get way more traffic and have been online for years.  The only thing that seems to be going slow is my page rank is still barely .98, while competitors are higher although they have lower Alexa Rank.

What am I doing right to get good Alexa  Rank?? What can I do to rais my PR and Domain Rank?

Competitors for example

[realmccoy101]

thanks guys.  my bubble just burst :).

[TheeDigital]

Because this is how Alexa gathers data.  If even one person goes to your site with the Alexa toolbar installed everyday for a year, while no one has the toolbar installed that goes to your competitors site, then you will have a higher Alexa rank even though your competitor may actually have 100x your traffic.  If the toolbar isn't installed, Alexa gathers no data.

[94501]

Hi,

Alexa has, for purposes of fictional number illustration, let's say one out of 10,000 web users using their toolbar. They then take that data and multiply it by 10,000 and say that represents web traffic in total. With that, they rank sites by estimated total.

They may have some other secret sauce, but that is basically it. So, if you have the tool bar and visit your site as much as you probably do while doing all that work, then it affects your Alexa rank.

It's kind of like why folks filter out your own office's web traffic from one's own Google Analytics data in order to get a clearer picture of pure traffic.

I hope that helps. Best... Mike

[realmccoy101]

not sure i understand what you mean about the tool bar.  i have it installed.  but are you saying that is why i'm seeing a better rank?  the reason i'm concerned with it is obviously it helps with advertising.  other businesses see you below 100k and also thought this was an important bench mark.  I mean its so many.  I thought alexa was the most important to onlookers.  I know actual traffic numbers and other more accurate bench marks are better meters, but was still curious how i got this number down so low in 11 months.  I see sites out there that have been around for 18 years and still in 2milliion.  the one thing i did is pay attention greatly to meta tags, titles, descriptions, duplicate content, things like that. but i want to break the 100k mark just for own satisfaction i guess :).  how can i do it ?  not to lose focus on the other stuff of course.

[realmccoy101]

why would having the tool bar installed matter??

[94501]

It sounds like real progress after less than a year - congrats!

Alexa Rank is an approximation of site traffic rank based mostly on visits to your site by those with the Alexa toolbar. I've compared sites with very similar traffic and found very different rankings. Just out of curiosity, why do you care what your Alexa Rank is? As the site owner, you know what the actual traffic is vs their very approx ranking.

Google PageRank is another infrequently updated calculation that doesn't mean much, especially with so many other benchmarks available.

Best of luck! .... Mike

[TheeDigital]

Perhaps you and people who frequent your site have the alexa toolbar installed?