Nowadays, Alexa rank becomes very popular in the web traffic statistics. It has been very important if you intend to monetize your web or blog. Many monetize web programs has prerequirement on some Alexa Rank level to join them. But what actually Alexa rank does? How they calculate and analize web traffic and ranking?

As described on the Alexa About page, Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The traffic rank is based on aggregated historical traffic data during three months from Alexa Toolbar users and other diverse traffic data sources. It 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 then averaged over time.

There are three key point here, reach, page views, and Alexa Toolbar.

Reach is number of unique visitors on the given sites and typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users (world wide) who visit a given site.

Page views measure the number of pages viewed by site visitors. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once.

Alexa Toolbar is the most important componennt on Alexa rank. Internet traffics analized by Alexa are only from web browser equiped that tool bar and they will ignore or disregard any other traffics. Unfortunately, the toolbar only available for Mozila and IE browser. No support for another browser like Opera nor Safari. This conditions influence the accuration of actual traffic ranking, since not all netters use Mozilla or IE eqiuped with Alexa Toolbar.

The one solution for this restriction is to install Alexa widget on our blog. When the wigdet installed, every visits on your blog will contact Alexa server to get recent data. By this, Alexa engine will calculate as a visit and your Alexa rank will increase significantly. But keep in the mind that Alexa Rank is very different with Google Pagerank.

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