I suppose the answer to that is personal. Alexa rank and page rank matter a great deal to some people and not much to others. Personally I have neither the Alex toolbar nor the Google toolbar installed. I know what my Alexa rank and my page rank are because I use a Firefox plugin that displays them both at the bottom of my screen. I pay attention to them both but I’m not obsessed with either of them.
Whether the Alexa rank & PR of a site really matter, I don’t know. They don’t matter a whole lot to me but they do offer a way to compare one site against another and that might be good. The problem is that neither of them makes much sense to me. What really matters is traffic not some seemingly random number assigned by a third party.
Take PR. At this point, this blog has a PR of 2. During the last update, the PR fell from 3 to 2. Despite the fact that I had built more links and was getting more traffic, the PR dropped. I don’t know why and I don’t really care but it doesn’t make much sense. The traffic numbers continue to rise and that’s more important to me.
The Alexa rank doesn’t make any sense to me either. I recently crossed over the 100,000 mark to about 96,000. As far as I can tell that’s the average Alexa rank over the past 3 months. Or is it? Whenever I check my Alexa rank, my 1 week average is somewhere between 50K - 80K. It’s been that way for several months. How can the average over the past 3 months be lower than all the weekly averages? The math doesn’t work out but Alexa says my rank is 96,735 today so that’s what it is. It’s a mystery to me whether that number comes from.
The bottom line is that I focus on activities that build links and increase traffic. The other stuff like Alexa & PR will take care of itself over time. My Alexa rank does continue to rise and the PR will probably rise too. What do you think? Do Alex & PR really matter?
Tags: Monetization, Make Money Online
Popularity: 31% [?]
5 Comments
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The only website statistic that really matters is how much money it makes you. Then again it is nice to measure whatever small successes you can find. Congrats on breaking the Alexa 100K barrier.
I agree with you 100%. You’re better off focusing on things that build your business (like building links and increasing traffic) than things that don’t (like PR and alexa rank). Like you said, over time those will take care of themselves.
Alexa is a gauge of the the popularity of a website based on the number of people visiting who happen to be using the alexa toolbar or an Alexa indicator of some kind. It’s know to be a very small subset of the total amount of traffic. It’s inherently inaccurate.
After the last Google update I noticed that every single duplicate of my original articles were eliminated from the Google results. This eliminated about 100 links for each article I had written. If you extrapolate that to every duplicate article out there, PR is likely to drop across the board.
Hi Robert,
It’s my opinion that Alexa & PR are useful not so much as absolute traffic numbers, but as overall indicators.
I’ve found them useful not as static numbers, but for trends, inasmuch as indicating which way you are headed.
In regards to Chas comment Google is definitely killing the duplicate content.
But more importantly based on my testing the backlinks from unique article submissions in general seem to be less effective.
In the past, I have seen several comments on Matt Cutt’s blog with people saying Matt why does Google count links from article directories? These links are just link spam.
My guess is that in a future update both backlinks from article directories and many of the web 2.0 modern day link farms will be diminished in Google.
As bloggers if we stick together that should be good for us as it will make getting quality links that much harder…
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] have asked me this question a week ago I would have said no. Actually Robert Phillips asked this same question and that is exactly what I said. So why am I asking this question now? What made me [...]
Post a Comment