Alexa rankings

Larry has received a request for Alexa rankings. (Here’s a good article.) Whereas PageRank is Google scoring a site’s relevance, Alexa rankings are Alexa’s scoring of a site’s reach (number of unique users) and traffic. And those are certainly significant and meaningful criteria. But the method Alexa uses to accrue their data is quite dubious, Larry thinks. Alexa rankings are based on a small, self-selected and geographically skewed sample of internet users who’ve all installed the Alexa toolbar. Larry thinks the only thing Alexa rankings are good for is rough comparative intelligence when you don’t have access to accurate traffic data.

If an advertiser is looking to do a direct ad buy from a website, and wants to know what they’re getting for their money, the site owner can provide accurate traffic data. So you don’t see actual monetary transactions informed by Alexa rankings, not the way Google PageRank or actual traffic data gets used to inform ad pricing.

Larry toyed with the idea of having challenge participants configure their sites for tracking actual traffic via Google Analytics, but decided to save that maybe as the basis for a future challenge.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to roll up the Alexa rankings, just for fun:

Site	Alexa ranking
Caveat Robert	8
Dancing Videos Blog	5,102,695
Guess Who’s Dead	5,330,500
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	8,733,486
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	10,140,841
A Dollar Past Sunset	10,444,541
Mute’s Observations	13,531,075
ObituQueries	13,531,221

And if those results aren’t dubious, I don’t know what is. (Yes, low numbers are good.)

So to reiterate, the challenge winner is determined exclusively by Google PageRank.