How Alexa calculats your blog’s ranking

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Agenda: In this post i’ll tell you how exactly alexa.com calculates your blog’s ranking and elaborate some of the important points about it.

So in previous post i told you What is Alexa and what it does. Now it’s time to tell you how alexa determines your blog’s ranking. Why bother define it in my own way when alexa has already defined it clearly on their website. It says :

Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is 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 users and pageviews is ranked #1. Alexa’s traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.

Now some of the points in it need to be discussed here:

1. Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period :-

It means if your websie used to get many visitors but in last 3 month didn’t get many then your alexa rank will go down, it only calculates recent 3 month’s historical data to calculate blog’s rank.

2. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews:

It means if Website X gets 10 unique visitors and they all view only it’s homepare whereas blog B get a single user but browse 10 different pages of it then both blogs will be given 10 alexa credit.

3. Multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview:

It means if blog X has 100 different pages and you visit all the pages twice in a day and wish that Alexa will give you 200 credits in total. Sorry but you are wrong, you will be rewarded only 100 alexa credit on that day.

4. Alexa’s traffic rankings are for top level domains only:

It means if you have subdomain like forum.yourdomain.com in your blog, even then alexa calculates only yourdomain.com’s rank by calculating overall traffic rank. It doesn’t provide two different alexa rank.

5. Automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs:

It means that Alexa has some kind of Algorithm to determine sub domain (or sub directory incases like Geocities) traffic in sites like Blogger.com. But it seems that it takes time. That’s why you see Alexa Rank as 18 in new Blogger blogs which is the Alexa Rank of main domain, Blogger.com

So now you know how they calculate your blog’s ranking. In my next post of Alexa series, i will tell you the ways in which you can improve your alexa rank. It will be published tomorrow. Link is here: How to improve Alexa rank of your blog.

In each post, I will provide you a link to the next post and to previous post related to Alexa. So that you can actually follow it one by one in order.

Don’t hesitate to ask queries and doubts.

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