Alexa Rankings- Time to Look Beyond It and Think Differently

First of all, a very very happy INDEPENDENCE DAY to Indians all around the world. Today we complete 63 years of independence and now we are one of the fastest growing countries of the world. Let’s vow today to make it the best and a huge success so that the world could take us as an example.

A blog’s success and failure are pretty much measured by a metric other than money and traffic- comments. A good number of comments tell a new visitor that a healthy discussion is going on this blog and people are actually reading the content. And comments always encourage the blogger to write more and more good content. Comments are sure a nice way to get an overview about a blog’s popularity. But the question here is- should you judge a blog by its comment count? Let me explain you what happened.

I was going through a blog which was new for me and it was my first visit (as always, I won’t name it). The first thing I usually do when I see a new blog is to check their About page to know about the guy behind the blog and Advertise page to have a general idea about the stats of the blog. The blog stats told it was a PR2 blog with Alexa rank around 70,000. Then I returned back to homepage to check out the posts. And something struck my mind.

None of the posts on the homepage had more than 8 comments. There were around 7 posts but none with more than 8 comments. I was surprised because I personally believe that if you have good traffic, you ought to have good comments. Quite logical!! But here I could not see this relation. Why?

Here is a big question raised over Alexa’s authenticity. I do not say that Alexa is just some s**t and the rankings are not accurate but I will still like to raise a question here. Does Alexa rank the blogs just on the number of visits a blog gets irrespective of whether the traffic is not quality traffic or the blog is just aimed to get visitors in any possible way. I can sends ton of traffic to my blog using keywords related to po*n and gambling but they won’t get me even a single comment and Alexa will keep ranking me up and up.

Still, I have always relied over Alexa to get an overview of a blog and 90 times out of 100, they have been right. But being such a big name in the blogosphere with literally thousands of blogger relying on them for the idea of their world rank, Alexa needs to redefine its ranking criteria. They need to get remaining 10 also pin point accurate. They need to include some more parameters like comments, average time on site and other stuff which will make their ranking system fairer and will give every blog a chance, not just big blogs.

Being a new blogger myself, I knew how important Alexa rank is for new bloggers when they start blogging. It is the only thing they look at. And now it’s time for the brand Alexa to look over the needs for every blogger.

And for every blogger, do not get discouraged if your Alexa rank is not as you expected. There are many things beyond Alexa that can help you inspire and succeed.

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Tagged as: alexa, statistics

Article by Anil Agarwal

Anil has written 228 articles .

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