What's Going On With My Alexa Rank?

There are two questions that seem to come up quite often in both our forums and out in the Blogosphere. Why does the rank of my website jump around? And why is my website's rank getting worse when my site analytics clearly indicate that I am getting more traffic?

There are two main reasons why ranks change in ways that on the surface seem counterintuitive. First, the Alexa Traffic Rank of a given website isn't determined solely by the traffic to that site, but takes into account the traffic to all sites and ranks sites relative to each other. The second is something called The Long Tail.


By now most of us have heard about the The Long Tail. Originally coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired article, it refers to a frequency distribution where a few things are very probable and most things are not. The long tail describes all those low probability events. In the graph of a power law, the long tail is the tail-like distribution that moves off to the right (the yellow region in the graph). On the web there is a small number of very popular sites, and a very large number of sites with low traffic. In our case, any site with an Alexa Traffic Rank greater than 100,000 can be considered to be part of The Long Tail.

This is a nice theoretical concept, sure, but does it really answer why a website's rank jumps around? The thing is, even if Alexa had perfect information about all sites on the web, Alexa Traffic Ranks would still jump around. The reason is because the farther you go out onto the tail, the flatter it gets and the bigger effects small changes have. And since sites are ranked relative to each other, any small change in traffic to any site can result in big changes in the rank of given site.

Here is a non-Web example to explain this principle in action. Let's take every person in the United States of America and rank them based on income. That gives us 300 million people ranked from 1 to 300 million, with the person ranked at #1 earning somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and the person ranked #300 million earning nothing, with the rest of us somewhere in between. Like all long tail distributions there are vastly more people on the tail, earning little or no money, than there people at the head of the graph earning hundreds of millions.

Let's assume that the person ranked #50 million earned exactly $50,000 per year last year, and that she will earn exactly $50,000 again next year. Question: Will she still be ranked at #50 million next year? No. If the economy continues to recover, then people who made less because of the recession will suddenly make more and her rank will drop as their salaries increase. Conversely, if the recession continues then her rank will increase as millions of others start earning less. Her rank jumps around wildly, even though her actual earnings have remained unchanged.

What if the economy stayed steady-state, and our $50,000 earner got a raise of exactly $1, and now earns $55,001 per year. What will that do to her rankings? Will her ranking move up by 1 to #49,999,999? No. The long tail distribution tells us that the farther we go out on the tail the larger effect small changes can have. In her case, earning just one dollar more per year could vault her position in the rankings by thousands. This seemingly small change might alter things much more you might expect.

The same applies to websites. Your site analytics is telling you that you are getting more visitors and pageviews, but the problem is the sites ranked near you are seeing bigger increases so your Alexa Traffic Rank actually gets worse. Or maybe your site analytics is telling you that you are getting no significant increase in traffic, but those those small gains might be enough to give you a startling improvement in your Alexa Traffic Rank. It seems counterintuitive at first, I know, but once you understand what is going on it makes perfect sense.

In summary, your Alexa Traffic Rank is not just about your site's data, but also your site's data relative to every other site out there. And the farther you go out on the tail, the less change is required from any site to cause your site to move up or down in rank. If you are out on the tail and you improve your traffic a modest amount it could improve your rank by a million places or more.

The nice thing is the higher up the long tail you move, the lower your Alexa Traffic Rank, the less subject your site's rank is to these fluctuations. Find ways to increase your visitors, visits and pageviews, your Alexa Traffic Rank will follow.

We're Listening

We are always interested in hearing what you think, your ideas, your suggestions, and even your complaints. We pay attention to all feedback, and when we can we incorporate it into our short and long term planning. So, what's the best way to make sure you are heard? That's the easiest part of all.

The Alexa Help Forums

The Alexa Help Forums are the best place to report problems and give us feedback. We read every post, and try to respond to everything reasonably quickly. The forums exist because we want to hear what you have to say.

This Blog

Another good place to let us know what you are thinking is in the comments section of this blog. In an effort to combat linkbait and linkspam, all comments are moderated and we do ask that you do not post any links. We hate adding that restriction, in a perfect world it would be fine to write a comment and then link to your site. Unfortunately, though, if we do allow links or anything link-like then the blog comments section quickly becomes filled with noise and useless.

Twitter

We love Twitter, and are happy to discuss just about anything 140 characters at a time. Mention @AlexaInternet in your tweet, and we are almost guaranteed to respond. Some conversations do not lend themselves to 140 characters, of course. But for those that do, Twitter is perfect.

Again, we want to hear what you have to say. We're listening.

Finding Sites with the Site Finder

Have you tried the Alexa Site Finder recently? If not, we've made a few improvements that you might want to check out.

The Alexa Site Finder is different type of search engine, one that is designed to find websites about topics instead of pages related to them. Normally when we search for something online, we go to our favorite search engine (or the search box in our browser), type in a few words, and hit return. What we get is a list of pages related to those words through various algorithms and ranked by some sort of measure of relevance and importance. Often that is exactly what we want, pages that answer a specific question that we want answered.

Sometimes, however, I find I'm more interested in finding an entire website devoted to a topic. I'm more interested in discovery than an answer to a specific question. For example, pages that considered relevant to generic keywords such as "woodworking” or "insurance" are different than websites dedicated them, and using simple keyword searches it can be difficult to find websites about those topics because they're buried among a sea of pages.

This is where the Alexa Site Finder comes in. I can type "insurance" into the Find sites about box, press Go, and I have a list of websites about insurance. The Site Finder also returns the Alexa Traffic Rank for the site, along with possibly a description and popular search keywords that drive traffic to the site. The Alexa Traffic Rank is a measure of popularity, and the lower the rank, the more people visit and use the site (Google is rank 1). I like this extra information because I can usually use it to quickly decide if the site is one I'm interested in or not.

The Site Finder also allows me to filter my results by Country, Language, Category, Alexa Traffic Rank, and Adult Content. For example, I can filter my search results to include sites with no adult content and with predominantly US users. Or I can can restrict my searches to sites with ranks less than 100,000 to identify only popular sites, or with ranks greater than 100,000 to find those on the long tail.

So the next time you are in the mood to discover new sites on the web, try the Alexa Site Finder. I think you will find that it's a valuable tool, allowing you to move past endless lists of pages and focus in on sites dedicated to the content you are interested in. If you have any thoughts on how we might improve the Alexa Site Finder, please leave them in the comments below. You can also reach us through twitter, either @AlexaInternet or me personally @wcoburn. I'd love to hear what you think.