Alexa Rank measured a website’s popularity as compared with all other websites on the internet. It accounted for the number of unique visitors and the number of pages viewed on each visit.

Alexa Rank was retired on May 1, 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20220817082500/https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410503838999

How is Alexa Rank calculated?

Alexa determines the rank of a website based on a combined measure of unique visitors and pageviews. Unique visitors are determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

How could you use Alexa Rank?

One way you could use Alexa Rank is to compare websites, in order to determine whether or not you should advertise on them. For example, let’s say you’re trying to decide whether you should advertise on awebsite.com or anotherwebsite.com. If you were to get Alexa Rank for each site, this could help. Let’s say that awebsite.com has an Alexa Rank of 234,567 but anotherwebsite.com has an Alexa Rank of 123,456. That means more people come to anotherwebsite.com than awebsite.com So, if you hope more people will see your ad, you’d want to advertise on anotherwebsite.com, because it ranks higher.

Another way you could use Alexa Rank is as a part of your link building campaign. Any SEO consultant will tell you that we’re building links in order to build a website’s credibility in the eyes of Google. That credibility passes whether or not a person visits your site, from that link. If you’re only interested in links that build your authority, you should consider metrics that use links as their primary value (such as those from Moz or Majestic). On the other hand, if you also consider your Alexa Rank, when building links, you could see traffic come to your site, too. For example, considering our two websites above, if you were to build a link from either of those, you could possibly get traffic to your site, from that link. If, however, you built a link from a site outside of the top 1 Million Alexa ranked sites, you’re not likely to get much traffic. Building links on highly ranked Alexa sites can also help with your PR efforts- there are more people visiting those sites, who could be exposed to your brand.

How you should NOT use Alexa Rank

Don’t use Alexa Rank to gauge the success of your own website. Alexa Rank compares websites based on an estimate of their traffic. Most businesses don’t just want traffic to their site, they want traffic that produces more customers. Alexa has no way to know if this traffic is producing additional customers. If traffic doesn’t produce customers, it’s an expense rather than a value- you’ll have to upgrade servers, etc. Since the Alexa Rank puts websites in order, you also don’t know if your rank went up (or down) simply because of what’s happening on other sites. In other words, your Alexa Rank doesn’t necessarily affect your efforts at promoting your website.

Instead, Alexa Rank is a way to compare websites against each other. In-and-of itself, the Alexa Rank of a site doesn’t mean much.

How can you learn the Alexa Rank for a website?

Alexa Rank was retired on May 1, 2022. Read more here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220817082500/https://support.alexa.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410503838999

How does Alexa Rank compare with other web metrics?

The Bottom Line

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