Horse.com only has 108,000 Alexa Score – Why High Alexa Traffic Rank Scores Shouldn’t Be a Worry For Most

Don't forget to subscribe to iwebis RSS feed. You can also Subscribe to iwebis by Email Thanks for visiting!

I have been slowly watching my Alexa score increase (lower numbers are better) and have been wonder if I should really be concerned about it. I do realize that Alexa is not the ‘Lord of traffic rankings’ but it is one that is respected by many. There are many sites that I have visited that have a high Alexa score that has lead me to believe that high Alexa scores shouldn’t worry most people.

Before I continue let me offer you Alexa’s explanation of how their scores work.

What is Traffic Rank?

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site’s current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter.

What are sites and Web hosts?

Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the domain level. For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com and slate.msn.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com. An exception is blogs or personal home pages, which are treated separately if they can be automatically identified as such from the URLs in question. Also, sites which are found to be serving the “same” content are generally counted together as the same site.

I realize that this information is not news to many but some may be still confused by how it works. Alexa scores have been a big deal among the sponsored review world. Most blogger payment rates are calculated by different things like page rank, Technorati, rss subscribers and Alexa score. It has alway bothered me that Alexa was a part of this calculation.

As I mention in the title, Horse.com (one of the top horse websites on the net) has a high traffic rank of 108,000 but by far received more traffic than I did when my score was about that low. Why is this happening? Because unless you have visitors that are using a Alexa toolbar or are using the special Alexa redirect link your scores will not improve. Does Horse.com really care about their Alexa score? Not likely. Why? Because the score doesn’t apply to them. Alexa is not an accurate rating system for Horse.com because their visitors don’t use it.

An Alexa score should only be slightly more important to those that have visitors using the toolbar. The reason I say only slightly more is because when a website owner can improve their score by millions in just a few weeks then their is a real problem. If most of your traffic is coming from visitors using the toolbar then this type of ranking might have value to you. Alexa is just not an accurate way to show the true worth of most sites.

iwebis happens to be a site that could benefit from a good Alexa score. iwebis does have visitors that looks at these scores to gage value. However, I am not going to stress over a high Alexa score because I know there are many visitors that don’t even know what it means. We also must not forget that many readers prefer feed readers which means that they are not actually visiting your site. So what is an accurate gage of your traffic. It is my opinion that a combination of feed subscribers and a good old fashion stats meter.