Alexa in Chinese continues to grow

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The amount of positive feedback we've received about the Chinese version of the Alexa website has been amazing, sometimes even humbling. We have been listening to what you have to say, and are working hard to add new features to the cn.alexa.com to make it as useful as possible. For example, today we released a new "Top Sites" tab to cn.alexa.com, which includes the following sections.

• Top Sites on the web
  
• Top Chinese Language Sites
• Top Sites by country
• Top Sites by category

Just like in the Site Info pages, the website descriptions are given in Chinese when available. Also, while the Top Sites by Category defaults to "Top > World > Chinese Simplified", the entire directory of categories is available.

To make it easier for you to give us feedback, we've also added a place on the cn.alexa.com front page where you can email us your suggestions, either in English or Chinese. Have an idea of what we can do to make Alexa better? Let us know!

自从Alexa中文官方网站开设以来，我们得到众多振奋人心的反馈。对此，我们深受 鼓舞，同时也深表感激。我们一直在认真听取您的意见，加紧为cn.alexa.com添加新 的功能，使它能更好地为您服务。例如，今天我们在cn.alexa.com上发布了新的“顶 级网站”标签，它包括以下内容

• 全球顶级网站
• 中文顶级网站
• 按国家/地区排名的顶级网站
• 按类别排名的顶级网站

在添加新功能的同时，我们也非常注重网页内容的中文化。 例如在网站信息页面 中，我们尽量采用中文的网站描述。同样，按类别排名的顶级网站模块的默认类别是 简体中文“Top > World > Chinese Simplified”。我们也同时提供完整的类别目 录。

为了让您更方便和我们联系，我们在cn.alexa.com主页上开通了用户反馈功能。您可 以将您的中文或英文的意见和建议Email给我们。如果您有任何关于建设和提高Alexa 中文官方网站的想法，请让我们了解!

Webmasters, Own Your Site!

The Alexa help forums have been great for letting webmasters provide us with ideas for new services, as well as ways to improve existing ones. One such user-driven improvement is in the way webmasters interact with their Alexa data, including easy to use tools for editing your site's contact information and the ability for webmasters to respond directly to reviews of their site. In addition to being an engineer at Alexa I am also the webmaster of a small, personal site, and now like webmasters everywhere I can now take control of my site's information on Alexa and "Own My Site."

Edit Your Site Data

Editing the contact information for your site on Alexa has never been easier. Either starting from the "Contact Info" tab on your site's Site Information page, or on the "For Site Owners" tab near the top of the page, select the Self-service tools. You will be prompted to log, and you can use either an Alexa or your Facebook account. There is no advantage to having one type of account over another, use whichever is more convenient.

Once you have chosen the site you want to edit, you will need to verify that you are authorized to do so. You can become authorized either by adding a file to the root directory of your site, or adding a meta tag to your homepage. The methods work equally well, the former is a good choice if you have direct access to your web hosting, the latter if you do not. Once verified, editing your information is a simple as filling out and submitting a form. Easy! Your changes will appear on the Alexa website within 48 hours.

But what if takes divine intervention to get your company's homepage edited? Or what if you no longer own a website, and you want to remove your contact information completely? These situations do come up, so we offer a "manual verification" process to have an Alexa content editor change your information for you. As you might imagine this process is slow, up to 2 weeks, and you will have to go through the process again if you want to make more changes. So we highly recommend you use the automated system.

Respond to Reviews

Once you verify that you are authorized to edit a site, you will also be able to respond to reviews people have written about it. If you are logged in, any review for a site for which you are authorized will give you the option to "respond." You can respond once to each review, and responses fall under the same review guidelines the reviews themselves. Responses to reviews are attributed to the site, not your login, so your personal information remains that way. If you think a review was unfair, or want to clarify something, or even just want to thank the reviewer, you now can.

The Future

These are just a few of the improvements we have planned to allow you to own your content on Alexa. If you have ideas that you would like to share, please visit our help forums and share! We're listening.

Alexa, Now in Chinese

To better serve our Chinese users, today we are releasing a beta Chinese language version of the Alexa website, cn.alexa.com. You can browse the traffic stats, contact information, related links, clickstream data, and demographics of websites you are interested in, all in Chinese. At the moment only the 'Site Info' pages are available, but we will be rolling out more features soon. And if you have any ideas on how we can make the Chinese version of our website better, stop by our help forums and let us know.

In toolbar reviews

Since adding the ability to review websites back to Alexa.com, the response has been phenomenal. Reviews are a great way to share your experiences with a site, both good and bad, with others across the web. Now, with the latest release of the Alexa Toolbar, you can do in-toolbar reviews of websites.


Previously with the toolbar, if you decided you wanted to review a website from the toolbar, you clicked the five stars rating button. The button would send you to the Alexa website, where you could read the reviews people have written as well as write one of your own. This works fine, but what if you want to write a review without leaving the site you are on? Well, now you can do that too.

In the current version of the toolbar you will see a little clipboard icon next to the five star rating button. If you click the clipboard and are logged in, either with an Alexa account or through Facebook Connect, a window will appear and you will be able to write a review right there. If you are not logged in, or need to register for an account, then you will be prompted to do so before being able to write a review. The Alexa Toolbar makes reviewing websites all that much easier.

It's good to share

As the father of a toddler, I'm constantly reminding my little one how important it is to share. For good reason, too, sharing is a good thing. That's why we've made it easy to share Alexa Traffic Details with your friends, family, and the world. In the lower right hand corner of each Traffic Stats graph there are the words "Share this:" followed by two little icons (see the included image). The first icon allows you to share the page with your friends on Facebook, while the other to tweets it to your followers on Twitter. Sharing is good, and now sharing Alexa Traffic Details is easy, too.

Easier to find international rankings.

The ease with which you can find how websites are ranked by country has just gotten easier.



Let's first take a step back, though. Did you know that in addition to the global Alexa Traffic Rank, we rank websites by country as well? Okay, you probably did. The Top Sites by Country lists have been available for quite some time, and the Alexa Traffic Detail pages display the Alexa Traffic Rank broken down by country. For example, Google currently has a global Alexa Traffic Rank of #1, but is ranked #3 in Turkey and #11 in Japan. The Alexa Traffic Detail pages also give estimates for how the users of websites are distributed by country. In the example of Google, not quite 40% of people who visit Google are in the US, while almost 10% are in India, etc.



If you click around and look at the Traffic Detail pages for various website and pay attention to the distributions of users by country, it should come as little or no surprise just how international many sites are. After all, there are people all over the world surfing the web, right now. At Alexa we realize that that webmasters in countries like China, Turkey, and Germany, for example, might not care how well their website is doing in the USA or even globally, and we try to support all webmasters and enthusiasts regardless of where they are located or where their visitors are from.

To help make it easier to quickly tell which country a site is most popular in, we have added the traffic rank in the country where the site has the most visitors to the top of the Traffic Detail pages, next to the global Alexa Traffic Rank. For example, Google has an Alexa Traffic Rank of #1 and a Traffic Rank in US of #1. On the other hand, the popular Chinese search engine Baidu (shown in the graphics) has a global Alexa Traffic Rank of #9, but is the #1 site in China. This data isn't new, of course. As discussed above it has been available on the Traffic Detail pages for some time. What is new is a quick and easy to to see how a site is ranked globally as well as in the country where most of its users are.

Alexa 101: The Anatomy of the Traffic Rank Graph

This is the first in a series of blog postings dissecting the Alexa site information pages. In this posting we take a detailed look at the "Traffic Stats" tab in the center of the page. This is a great place to start when trying to understand the traffic visiting a website, how that traffic is trending over time, and how it compares with competing sites. You can follow along by visiting the site info page for your favorite site, for example #1-ranked Google

The Alexa traffic rank is calculated using a combination of average daily reach and pageviews. What is "reach"? We'll have more to say about this in an upcoming post, but basically it measures how many people are visiting a site, expressed as a fraction of the global Internet population. For example, if you click on the "Reach" link below the "Traffic Stats" tab, you can see that Google's reach is currently around 33%, meaning that about one in three Internet users visit google.com on a typical day.

As the site with the highest combination of reach and pageviews, Google is currently ranked #1. The site with the second highest combination is #2, the next is #3, and so on. The best way to improve your Alexa traffic rank, that is to get a rank that is a smaller number than you have now, is to attract more visitors to your site and keep them engaged (and clicking) on more pages. Note that reach is weighted more heavily than pageviews in the combination, so other things being equal, the former (adding visitors) counts for more than the latter (adding pageviews per user).

The main Alexa traffic rank (as displayed in the Alexa toolbar) is a three-month rolling average, while the points in the Traffic Stats rank graph are daily. While the daily Alexa Traffic Ranks allow you to see fluctuations in a site's traffic on a very short timescale, the longer-term averages listed on the site information pages (and used for our Top Sites lists) are much more robust and authoritative for sites with low traffic. Note that ranks above about 100,000 should be taken with a healthy grain of salt and are not displayed on our graphs.


When looking at a Traffic Rank graph, what are some if the things you see? For some sites the first thing you might notice is an approximate 7-day periodicity in the data. This is because the "weekend web" is a little different than the weekday web, and some sites are less popular (or more popular) destinations on the weekend. You can clearly see this effect in the traffic graph for LinkedIn, the popular networking site for professionals.



Another feature you can see in traffic rank graphs is how a website's rank is trending over time. The three-month average is just that, a rank based on the accumulated reach and pageviews over the course of three months. Facebook, for example, recently moved ahead of YouTube and into the number three position. But this reversal happened a while ago in both the daily traffic rank estimates and in the one-month traffic rank. We can also see that Facebook is continuing to grow, and it could soon overtake #2 Yahoo (which until 2009 had long been #1).

What is all this good for? Well, at some level it is fun and interesting. The fact that Facebook is on any given day globally the 3rd most popular destination in the world says a lot about what people are using the web for. This pattern is not limited to just Facebook, either, but other community sites such as Wikipedia, Blogger, and Twitter, all all trending upward as well. People are using the web to connect with each other, and while this is not a new revelation it certainly is apparent in the data.

This analysis doesn't have to be limited to social networks or top sites, either. If you own a website, you can use Traffic Rank to compare your site to those of your competitors. Does the competition have a better (lower) rank than you? If so, you can start asking yourself why they are getting more visitors and/or pageviews, and what you can do to improve your rank in relation to theirs. Be careful, though. Even if your Alexa Traffic Rank is better than your competitors, that does not necessarily mean you are getting more of the quality traffic you want. For that you need to delve further into the Traffic Stats graph, which we will do in the next installment of this series.