The Alexa Blog

Introducing Alexa Pro

2011-09-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce that starting today we will begin offering "Alexa Pro" subscription services for site owners.

For years Alexa has been the leading provider of free analytics for the web, and we will continue to provide free web analytics so that webmasters worldwide can monitor their Alexa Traffic Rank and other stats. With the addition of Alexa Pro, website owners can now use Alexa services to improve and grow their online businesses as well.

"We want to give site owners the insights and tools they need to be successful on the web," says Dave Sherfesee, Alexa's General Manager, "These services are the first of Alexa's new professional offerings."

The Alexa Pro Basic subscription is only $9.99/month, and is designed to be an affordable plan for small sites. Alexa Pro Basic includes a Premium Listing on Alexa.com and the ability to Certify your website. A Premium Listing includes branding, links back to your website, and overall more control over how your website is presented on Alexa.com. If you also choose to Certify your website, you will have the option of publishing your directly-measured visitors and pageviews metrics. See the Alexa Preimum Listing page for more details.

The $149/month Alexa Pro Advanced Plan offers bi-weekly Site Audit reports in addition to all the features in the Basic plan. With reports running automatically twice each month, the Alexa Site Audit monitors a website for performance, security and SEO best practices so site owners can concentrate on growing their businesses. All current Site Audit subscribers have been upgraded to the new Alexa Pro Advanced subscription for free. See the Alexa Site Audit page for more details.

For a comparison of all subscription services see the Alexa Pro subscription comparisons page.

Along with these new services, we have added a new Dashboard feature. The Dashboard is a custom view of Alexa that gathers all reports and sites in one place. From the Dashboard, subscribers can access a private stats dashboard (currently in beta) where they can keep tabs on their most-important site metrics.

We are very excited about these new offerings, but this is just the start. We want to help small and medium online businesses not only monitor how they are doing, but also allow them to take control and grow their business.

Introducing the Alexa Toolbar Creator

2011-04-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

Did you know that you can now create a toolbar for your website that includes all of your own content and branding, yet is powered by Alexa? You can, and it's easy.

The Alexa Toolbar Creator allows you to build a custom toolbar to help you connect with your visitors and increase traffic to your site. You can choose from a selection of features to add, including your logo, site search, custom menus, links to popular content on your site, and social networking. Also, by including dynamic headlines from blogs or other RSS/Atom feeds, you can message your customers in real time, wherever they are on the web. You can create toolbars for Internet Explorer or Firefox, and yes Chrome is on the way.

How easy is it to create a toolbar? Easy, but don't just take my word for it. Watch this short video to see just how easy it can be.

Every toolbar built also includes access to Alexa data, so anyone who installs your toolbar will get the advantage of Alexa's website information. This also means anyone who installs your toolbar will also have the option of joining the millions of people already in the Alexa Toolbar Panel, helping to make the web a better place for everyone by contributing to Alexa's free, public web metrics.

A custom built Alexa toolbar is a great way to connect with your customers, build your community, and increase traffic to your website. Check it out!

Audit Your Google Analytics Coverage

2011-03-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Alexa Site Audit now checks your site for Google Analytics tags, and tells you which of your pages are missing them. Using a pixel based analytics solution, such as Google Analytics, is a great way to get insights into how people are using your website. The problem is making sure that all of your pages have the tracking code, or tag, that generates the pixel installed. For small sites it is easy to manually check every page, but for larger sites that is unrealistic. So now, in addition to great SEO and useabiltiy recommendations, the Alexa Site Audit will check your pages for Google Analytics tags for you.

The report is fairly simple, but then it doesn't need to be complicated. We list the tag type, the coverage, how many pages were checked in the audit, and how many pages were missing tags. We also break the list down by subdomain, to make it easier to identify large portions of your site that might be missing tags. If we find tags on every page we crawl, there will be a green check mark indicating everything is fine.

The example report above is for my family blog, and it looks like I am missing Google Analytics tags on 4 pages. To find out which pages those are, I can either click the link or download the entire list of URLs as a CSV file. With this information I can go back and make sure that each and every page on my site has a tag on it, and with my free follow-up report I can verify that I have 100% coverage. No more wondering, with the Alexa Site Audit I know how well my site has been covered with Google Analytics tags.

Audit Your Landing Pages

2011-02-03T16:00:00.000-08:00

We have added what we feel is a cool new feature to the Alexa Site Audit, the Landing Page Auditor. The Landing Page Auditor is a simple, yet powerful, interactive tool designed to help you giving your landing pages the best SEO boost you can.

You start by choosing a page you want to audit. It can be any page on your site, but you want to concentrate on those few pages you really want to drive organic search traffic to. The idea is do everything you can to help search engines learn what these pages are about, and to emphasize that these are the pages to show when people search for your keywords.

When you click on the Landing Page Auditor, the first thing you see are tables containing an overview and a histogram of all the anchor text on your site for links to the page you are analyzing. If you look at the screen shot to the right, which was taken from a report run on my family blog, you can see that my site has 3064 links to my home page. You can also see how the numbers of links break down by anchor text phrase.

Looking at your anchor text is a great place to start. First, make sure that your text is descriptive and that you have avoided phrases like "click here" or "more". For my blog, over 1000 pages have "Home" as anchor text. These "Home" links, while fine for visitors to my blog, are of little value to a search engine. Also, while you are looking over your anchor text, make sure each phrase describes the page you are auditing. With the exception of "Home" and a few navigation links, the anchor text to my blog's home page seems to be reasonable so I'll move on.

Once you are comfortable with your anchor text, the next step is to enter the keyword or keyword phrase you want to audit. Landing pages should be fairly specific, so you should optimize each page for three to five keywords. There are a small number of crucial places you want your keyword to appear, and when you enter your keyword a new column will appear telling you which of these crucial your keyword appears in. In the example to the right, you can see that my keyword phrase is missing in all but the page text. I guess I have some work to do.

By default we show you the results of the page crawled as part of the site audit, but you can also check your live site by pressing the "Update From Live Site" button. Since the anchor text data is built by looking at your entire site, the only way to update that data is to run another report.

When a keyword has been entered, the anchor text column on the left also changes slightly. The data is the same, but it is split between links whose anchor text contain the keyword and links whose anchor text does not. In the example, less than 1/3 of the links on my site to my home page have anchor text containing my keyword phrase. I am fine with that since I want my anchor text to be optimized for other keywords as well, and I want to avoid keyword stuffing.

Once I am happy with my page and have decided on the changes I want to make to my anchor text, I can move on to my the next keyword or my next landing page. That's it. As I said, the Landing Page Auditor is a simple yet powerful tool to help you optimize your website for organic search.

Measuring the Internet Blackout in Egypt

2011-02-01T11:34:00.000-08:00

It has been widely reported that the Egyptian government has essentially flipped a "kill switch" on the internet, making access in or out of the country largely unavailable starting just after midnight Friday, as large political protests took place. Limited numbers of sites have been routinely blocked by a number of countries, but Egypt has taken the unprecedented step of blocking access to all sites for most of its users. Media reports on the outage have quoted analyses based on the availability of Egyptian networks and servers from outside the country, yielding estimates that around 88% to 92% of connections had initially gone dark before a last working ISP (the Noor Group) also pulled the plug late on Monday.

Alexa's worldwide panel of internet users, on the other hand, allows us to estimate the fraction of users who have been affected within the country. The results paint an even more severe picture of the shutdown, with more than 99.3% of Egyptian users blocked starting on Jan 28.

In the graph below, we scale the number of Egyptian users per day so that the number of users we observed on Jan 21 is set to 100. Note that the vertical axis is plotted with a logarithmic scale. The size of our panel is sufficient to measure the outage with a very high degree of statistical significance; we have assumed here only that users of the Noor Group ISP are not significantly less likely to be included in our panel than users of other Egyptian ISPs.


Date | Users
Jan 28 | 0.69%
Jan 29 | 0.67%
Jan 30 | 0.62%
Jan 31 | 0.70%

We have also observed a huge increase of over 200% in traffic to aljazeera.net, as people try to learn about the events unfolding in Egypt. The next graph below shows the percentage of internet users who visited the site each day over the past week. More information is available on our site info page.

Has traffic to your site dropped? You're not alone.

2010-10-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

As many webmasters and website owners by now know, sometime around October 21st Google changed how they ranked search results. This change, or possibly changes, caused the traffic to some sites to drop by as much as 80%. The Google Webmaster Forums are alive with questions about what happened, and how webmasters should react (for examples see here, here, and here).

At Alexa we can confirm that this wasn't something isolated to a few websites, but rather a change in the search results shown by Google that is shifting traffic across the web. Also, while some sites are losing traffic, others are seeing gains of 30% or more. The exact nature of the change is still under investigation, but it is possible that Google made an Algorithmic change in how they rank search results. This is very serious for many sites. If a website is trying to monetize their traffic, either through selling products or lead generation or simply showing ads, a sudden drop in the number of visitors can represent an unexpected and possibly significant change in the bottom line.

This shifting of web traffic is best illustrated by looking at the daily Reach graphs for different sites. A website's reach is determined by the number of unique visitors to a site, shown as a percentage of the total number of people on the Internet that day.

First, here is site that was showing nice growth over the past three months, and then took a sudden hit in traffic between the 21st and 22nd. I've only shown one example here, but this is happening across the web.

Search traffic isn't quite a zero sum game, but it's close and some sites have experienced a significant increase in visitors due to the Google change. Among the biggest winners, oddly enough, are file sharing and torrent sites. It's tempting to speculate why Google might be sending more visitors to file sharing sites, but it's still too early in our analysis to say anything definitive.

So far the changes in traffic to affected sites have been sustained, so this appears to be a deliberate change on the part of Google instead of a transient glitch in their system. There were some indexing issues that happened prior to the change that caused some sites to report problems as early as the 19th, but according to our data the change to Google's search results went live on October 21st around 3PM Mountain View time. The change may be related to the "Mayday" change, but given how quickly web wide traffic shifted it seems unlikely this was something that had been slowly percolating through Google's indexing system over the past six months.

Our analysis of the October 21st event is ongoing, and I will update this blog as we uncover more information.

The Alexa Site Audit

2010-07-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

Today I thought I would write about one of our newest offerings, the Alexa Site Audit. The Site Audit takes an in depth look at your website, grades it, and recommends ways to make it easier for people to find and use it. This is a project I've been personally involved in since the beginning, so I am especially exited today to be blogging about it.

Once a report is initiated, our Site Audit crawler crawls your website. Depending on how many pages your site has, and how quickly we can fetch them, this can take up to 12 hours to perform. We then process the crawled pages, which can take several hours, and only when the report is done do we bill you. Because the process takes some time, we will send you an email when the report is complete. If you log in you may see your report as "payment pending," don't worry. It can sometimes take over an hour for the payment to complete, although most of the time it's much faster.

When you click on the finished report, the first page you see is an overview with your sites's grade and our top recommendations for improving it. The report is broken into five sections, Crawl Coverage, Reputation, Page Optimization, Keywords, and Stats. The first three sections contribute to your grade, while the last one is for anyone interested in the details of the crawl.

I've included screenshots of a report run on my family blog. As you can see I received a grade of "C". Ouch. I guess I have some work to do. It looks like I need to work on getting links to my site from more popular sites, and I need to make sure I have relevant title and meta descriptions on each of my pages.

Crawl Coverage: This section of the report is about the structure of your website, and makes recommendations on how easy it is for crawlers and visitors to find pages. In the example you can see that the reachability of pages in my site is quite poor, and over two thirds of the pages were more than three clicks away from the home page. I obviously need to make sure content on my site is easier for visitors to find. I can also see if I've accidentally blocked any important search engines from crawling my site, how many temporary redirects were found, etc.

Reputation: The reputation of a site, at least in terms of Page Rank, is based on how many sites link it to it and what their reputations are. My blog is in the 9th percentile for inbound links, which means that 91% of sites with a similar Alexa Traffic Rank have more inbound links than my site does. I guess I really do need to work on getting other sites to link to me. Note that by default the graph in the example screen shot is hidden, but if you click on "Learn More" you will see it for your site.

Page Optimization: This section gives recommendations on how to improve the pages of your site, as opposed to the Crawl Coverage section which makes recommendations based on site structure. Here we identify things like duplicate content, which is when two or more URLs show the same "page", pages with little text, missing image descriptions, broken links, etc. The report found two broken links on my blog, which I probably would have never found otherwise.

Keywords: This section recommends keywords to buy if you advertise your site on search engines. We also suggest words to use when linking to pages within your site. Using descriptive words in link text makes it easier for search engines to understand what the linked-to pages are about, and using popular yet relevant words will make the linked-to pages easer to find in search engines.

Stats: This section provides a short summary of the crawl of your site we performed. It includes information such as the number of pages we requested, the errors we encountered, and the unique hosts we crawled. Even if you're not that interested in stats, I do recommend looking over the Unique Hosts Crawled. If you see any sites on the list you don't recognize, it may mean you have some spam links somewhere on your site.

I hope this inspires you to run an Alexa Site Audit, and that you find it useful. We welcome all questions and feedback. You can post to the Alexa help forums, in the comments section here, or send an email to siteaudit@alexa.com.

Alexa for Google Chrome

2010-06-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Over the past months we have gotten a large number of requests for an Alexa Toolbar for the Google Chrome browser. Well, today I am happy to announce that the Alexa Traffic Rank extension for Chrome is now available to download and install! You can find it in the Chrome Extension Gallery, or by following the link above.

As you browse, the Extension icon shows you graphically the rank of the site you are visiting, and if you hover your mouse over the icon you can see the numeric Alexa Traffic Rank.

If you click on the Alexa icon, a window appears with more information about the site. You can see what the site's rank is, approximately how many domains link to it, how well reviewed it is, as well as related sites. You can also easily browse to Alexa's search analytics page for the site, or see what it looked like in the past at the Wayback Machine.

Another added benefit is inclusion in the Alexa Traffic Panel. This is the only Chrome Extension that includes you in our panel, and of course only if you decide you want to participate.

Let us know what you think!

Advanced Demographics

2010-05-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

You may be familiar with Alexa's demographics data, but if not then you're in for an extra treat. This week we added a new "Advanced Demographics" feature that includes two new pieces of data, and allows you to easily compare the demographics of up to five sites.

For those unfamiliar, you can find Alexa's demographics data under the "Audience" tab on most site information pages. Here you can see estimates of a website's audience broken down by age, gender, education, whether or not they have children, and where they are browsing from. The graphs are set up so that the line down the center is the internet average. A green line to the right means the site is over-represented compared to the internet, while a red line to the right means the site is under-represented. For example, Alexa's data shows that Facebook is under-represented by people 45 and older. So not only are there fewer people over 45 on the web compared to those under 45, but fewer still of those 45+ year olds are visiting Facebook.

In the Advanced Demographics section, we offer two new pieces of demographics data; Income and Ethnicity. That's certainly useful, but to make it even better you can also compare the site you are interested in with up to four other sites, and across all seven demographics segments. We've pre-populated the comparisons with similar sites, but you can compare any set of four sites you want. You might want to compare your site to your competitors, or across multiple sites you own, or you can just have fun. Comparing the audiences of various news agencies with one another is certainly interesting, and that's just a start.

There is one catch, however. If you want to use the Advanced Demographics tool you need to have the Alexa Toolbar installed. This is our way of thanking those who have elected to surf the web with the toolbar, and be part of the Alexa panel. The Alexa panel is the source of most of Alexa's data, including our demographics. We have toolbars for both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and for those who browse with Chrome we hear you and hope to have an answer very soon.

So check out the Advanced Demographics and let us know what you think!

Get Notified!

2010-04-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

Do you have an Alexa or IMDb toolbar for Firefox installed? Do you use Gmail? Then you might want to check out our new Gmail notifier button for our Firefox toolbars. Like our Facebook and Twitter buttons, it is entirely optional. As it's name implies, the Gmail notifier button lets you know when you have new email. The drop down menu lists the time, sender, and subject line of each unread email, making it easy to check you email without browsing away from the page you are currently viewing. It looks like right now I have 8 unread emails, I should do something about that.

You can add any of the optional buttons by clicking on "Add Buttons..." in the drop down menu next to the toolbar Logo. This menu also allows you to configure your toolbar, set the order in which the optional buttons appear in your toolbar, view the Alexa privacy policy, get some help, or take a tour.

Do you have ideas for cool toolbar features? If so, let us know!

Search Analytics with Alexa

2010-04-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

Some time ago we released some new Search Analytics features, and so far the feedback has been very positive. In this blog post I thought I would go over some of what you can use Alexa's search analytics for, both to increase the traffic to your site from search engines and to monitor what the competition is doing.

Let's start by going to your favorite website's site information page and clicking on the "Search Analytics" tab. This is the heart of search analytics for a site, so I'll step through each section one by one.

Search Traffic
This is the percentage of visits to the website that come from searches on search engines. These include Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, and many more. It's also worth pointing out that these are visits from searches, and not all traffic from the search engine's domain. Google, especially, can drive significant non-search related traffic to websites through Google news, Google groups, gmail, etc. A quick thing to do here is compare your percentages with those of your competiton. Are you better at being found on search engines?

Top Queries from Search Traffic
This is a list of the top search terms, both organic and paid, that lead traffic to the site. If you want to know which phrases are the most important in terms of raw visits, this is where you should look.

Search Information
If you click on any of the Top Queries, or any search phrase on this page, you will be taken to a Search Information page and find specific information about the term. First is the Query Popularity for the search, which is just that. It is a measure of popular the search is, with a larger number meaning more people search for the phrase. The Query Competition Index, or QCI, is a measure of how many times ads appear for the term. The larger the QCI the more advertisements there are. The Share of Voice shows which sites the term drives the most traffic to, along with which percentages of the term's traffic go to each site. Lastly you will find the term's Engagement for each site. The Engagement is an indication of how much time someone spends on the site compared to the average visitor to the site.

Now back the the site's Search Analytics section.

High Impact Search Queries for site
This is a list of search phrases and sub-phrases that drive organic traffic to a website, sorted by their Impact Factor. The Impact Factor takes into account how much traffic a phrase drives to the site, how popular the phrase is (Query Popularity), and how much competition there is for that phrase (QCI). This can give you a quick look into which terms are important for a site's organic search, especially those with a high popularity but low QCI.

This is as much as you can get without a toolbar installed. If you do install and Alexa Toolbar, you will see two more sections devoted to SEM.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Activity by site
These are the terms the site is paying to get traffic from. This is a great way keep tabs on your competition's SEM campaigns across all search engines. The SEM activity indicates how aggressively the site was advertising for these terms, and is rated as either High, Medium, or Low.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Opportunities for site
These are queries that offer the greatest opportunity for the site to get more traffic through SEM, sorted by the Opportunity score. The Opportunity of a term is calculated using a number of different measures. First is the Query Popularity, if no one is searching for a term then it offers less of an opportunity. The next factor taken into consideration is the QCI. Terms with a lower QCI have less competition, and therefore you will presumably have to bid less for them. Lastly are terms that have a small share of voice for the site. Even if a term is a High Impact Search Query, meaning it is generating organic search traffic for the site, the traffic to the site through that term might be a tiny fraction of the overall search traffic for the term.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas for how you might use search to increase the traffic to your site. I plan on walking through a few case studies in future blog posts, if you a specific use case you would like to see addressed then please leave it in a comment below or send it via Twitter (@alexainternet or @wcoburn)

IMDb Toolbar

2010-04-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

If you're a movie fan, check out the new toolbar for the Internet Movie Database! You can search IMDb and get the latest movie news right in your browser. It's actually quite addictive.

Other features include the IMDb twitter feed, celebrity birthdays, TV and movie listings. Optional buttons allow you connect to friends using Facebook and Twitter.

Since the IMDb toolbar is built on the Alexa Toolbar Platform you also get also website popularity information via the popularity meter on the toolbar. Clicking on the meter pops up a window with stats for that site.

You can check out the features and download the toolbar from imdb.alexatoolbars.com

(The toolbar is only available for Firefox right now, but we're working on versions for other browsers)

What Does it Mean to be Number 1?

2010-03-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

Last week there was quite a bit of press around the fact that Facebook was the most popular site on the web. This is great for Facebook, but ultimately what does it mean to be the most popular site on the web? How do you measure site popularity? And what does Alexa's data show?

Last week's release was based on weekly numbers of US visits to google.com vs. facebook.com, expressed as percentages of the total number US visits to websites. Are visits the best way to measure popularity of a website? Yes and no. Analysts love visits because they are an easy way to measure using click stream data, but unfortunately the definition of a visit is somewhat arbitrary.

It is unclear from the article how exactly a visit is defined, but the Web Analytics Association defines a visit as

"an interaction, by an individual, with a web site consisting of one or more requests for a page. If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the visit will terminate by timing out."

The standard timeout for visits is 30 minutes. This means that if I refresh my Facebook News Feed every 15 minutes for 8 hours, I've made one visit to Facebook that day. If, however, I refresh once an hour for 8 hours, that's eight visits because the time between refreshes is greater than 30 minutes. So, if you only look at visits to measure popularity, you would say a site that people check frequently throughout the day (a single day long visit per person) is less popular than one people visit sporadically during the day (many short visits per person). Do people visit Google and Facebook in the same way?

At Alexa, we take a broader approach in determining popularity as measured by the Alexa Traffic Rank. The Alexa Traffic Rank of a site is based on the global number of unique visitors to a website, and the number of unique pages seen by each visitor. Visits, due to the vagaries in the definition, aren't even part of the equation. The Alexa Traffic Rank is also a 3-month trailing average, so for at least the top 100,000 sites small changes on shorter timescales are averaged out. By construction, the Alexa Traffic Rank measures popularity based on the number of people who see the content on a site, and how much unique content they view, measured over the past three months.

Obviously, the Alexa Traffic Rank is very different way to measure popularity than the number of times people have visited a site in the past week. But even subtle differences in how something is measured, or the interval over which it is measured, can alter the results. For example, whether or not to include AJAX, Flash, or other Rich Internet Applications when defining a visit can significantly change the final number. This is an important thing to remember when comparing data across different services. If you do not understand what you are looking at, then you can easily be led to wrong conclusions.

So, which is a better measure of popularity, visits or the Alexa Traffic Rank? Well, the Alexa Traffic Rank is an excellent indicator of popularity because it reflects the number of people visiting a site and the amount of content they are exposed to. But I wouldn't choose a single number, there are a lot of other things to consider when comparing the success and popularity of websites.

Pageviews can give you a clue as to how people are interacting with a site, as can bounce rate, time on site, etc. Also, audience profiles, upstream sites, and percentage of traffic from search, and downstream sites can tell you who the visitors are, what routes they are taking to find the site, and how well they are being served. But even that isn't enough. The objectives of sites vary significantly, so what are good numbers for one site might not be good for another. For example, bounce rate is generally uninteresting for a blog because people tend to either check the home page or find content via search engines. For a retail site, however, a high bounce rate might be very telling. On that same retail site, a large number of page views might indicate people are highly engaged and doing research on products, or that they are having problems with navigation and are clicking around blindly before leaving. So to truly measure the success of a website, you need to understand what the goals of the site are and then identify the metrics that make sense for measuring those goals.

In case you haven't checked already, the Alexa Traffic Rank for Google is still #1 and Facebook is still #2. Which site do you think is the most popular? How would you measure it?

Advertise on Alexa.com!

2010-03-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

Did you know we have a new self service advertising solution for Alexa.com? This is a great way to reach one of the largest audiences of Web technology professionals and website owners in the Internet industry. There are three placements, and the prices range from $2 to $6 per thousand ad impressions. The minimum order is only $20, so why not take a look at our self service ad manager now, or see the rate card for full details of pricing.

If you need more control over you advertising campaign or want to advertise on a larger scale, Alexa.com also offers enterprise level assistance. This is a full service option for companies that want to spend over $1000 per month. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at advertising@alexa.com and we can discuss your individual needs.

Toolbar Updates

2010-03-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

We've made some small updates to all of the Alexa Toolbars. These include the Alexa Toolbar for IE and the Alexa Toolbar for Firefox, both of which are available now through alexa.com, and Alexa Sparky, which will be available as soon as it is approved by Mozilla. The changes are mainly bug fixes and performance enhancements, all designed to make using the toolbar a better overall experience. If you haven't auto updated already, you should be prompted to soon. And as always, be sure to let us know what you think. You can leave us a message in the Alexa Forums, you can leave a comment below, or you can reach us through Twitter (either @AlexaInternet or me personally @wcoburn). Good experiences, bad experiences, bug fixes, let us know. We're very interested in hearing from you.

What's Going On With My Alexa Rank?

2010-02-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Search Analytics with Alexa

2010-01-28T16:00:00.000-08:00

When we search for something on the internet, either through a search engine like Google or a site's dedicated search, we're showing our intent. Our exact intent isn't always obvious, a search for "Italian coffee maker" could indicate we want to purchase an stove top espresso maker, or that we're looking for instructions on how to brew Italian style coffee, or even trying to find an Italian coffee shop. Most modern search engines, however, do a fairly good job of guessing what we might be interested in and showing us results we're interested in. It is this intent that makes search engines so important.

If you own a website, you of course want your site to be considered among the most relevant for searches that apply to your site. But what are the best searches to optimize for? It's easy to generate a short list of terms that seem important, but are people really searching for those terms? Your site analytics will tell you which terms are sending traffic your way via various search engines, but which terms are you missing? Also, wouldn't it be great to know which terms are sending traffic to your competitors, and how important they are?

This is where Alexa Search Analytics comes in.

There are three pieces of data we present: Search Traffic, Top Keywords from Search Traffic, and Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic.

Search Traffic is an estimate of the percentage of visits to the site that come from search engines. The goal of most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) initiatives is to increase the percentage of quality traffic to a site coming from search engines, and Search Traffic indicates how well this is working. In the example to the right, the numbers are steady at slightly under 1 in 3 visits coming from search engines. What does this graph say about your competitors? Are the numbers climbing, indicating that they recently launched a successful SEO initiative? How do their SEO efforts compare to yours?

Next are the Top Keywords from Search Traffic. These are the keywords and keyword phrases driving traffic the most traffic to the site. In the example, the top 10 keyword phrases account for less than 3.5% of the total search engine traffic, meaning that this site is optimized for a wide range of phrases. This is good, because the more phases search engines consider you relevant to, the more potential traffic you can drive to your site. What does your site analytics say about your keywords? What do we say about your competitors? Do they have a wider variety of terms leading to their site? If so, you might start thinking about ways to improve your SEO.

Lastly are the Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic. These are the important terms, because they're there keyword terms and phrases that are driving significant amounts of traffic to the site you are analyzing. The relative importance of the phrases to the site is indicated by the green bar. In the example to the right, which has been truncated for space, we again see a wide variety of terms. These are often different from the Top Keywords, because again this list takes into account how popular the term itself is. You can, however, and should ask similar questions. What does this list say about your competitor's SEO? Is it dominated by a few words, or is there a broad range? How do you compare? Can you identify phrases that offer you the best opportunities?

Thoughts? Then please leave a comment below! Note, however, that all comments are moderated, and comments containing URLs will be deleted. You can also reach us through twitter, either @AlexaInternet or me personally @wcoburn. And, as always, you can leave us a message in the Alexa Forums. I am very interested to hear what you have to say about this.

Get a Reviews Widget for your site!

2010-01-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

Since we reintroduced website reviews on Alexa, we have received a number of requests from webmasters for help getting their site reviewed. Well, one of the easiest ways to get visitors to review your site is to politely ask them to. If a visitor loves your site and wants to help promote it, it should be easy. But we wanted to make it even easier, so you can now download one of our new Alexa Reviews Widget and place it on your site.

If you are familiar with the Alexa Site Widgets, the Review Widget is similar. All you need to do is go to the For Site Owners area on Alexa.com, where you will see the full selection of widgets we have to offer, and select Get Reviews Widgets. We offer two styles of Reviews Widget, each in three sizes. Choose the one you want, enter in the domain of your website, and we'll generate a short snippet of HTML code that is ready to cut and paste into place. It's simple and easy, so what are you waiting for? Install an Alexa Reviews Widget on your site today.

2009 Year in Review

2010-01-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

For those of you using the Gregorian calendar, Happy New Year! It has been an amazing year for us here at Alexa, one that has brought with it a large number of improvements. I thought I would take some time to cover some of the more exciting ones, in no particular order.

A New Website

Probably the biggest and most visible change was the new Alexa website. Our old website was fine, of course, but the time had come for an updated look. The new website has also allowed us a lot more flexibility, too, and has made it easier to add new things. Among the additions are metrics about who's visiting a site, how they got there, where they go next, and what they're doing on the web right now. With our new site we also embraced the social web, making it easier for you to share information with your friends through buttons that allow you to post a page to your Facebook wall or Tweet about it.

A Toolbar for Firefox

In late November, we unveiled the new Alexa Toolbar for Firefox. We've had Sparky, a lightweight Alexa add-on for Firefox for some time now, but not a true toolbar like the one we offer for Internet Explorer. That's changed. Also, in addition to our standard toolbar features, we added two new, optional social networking buttons for Firefox users. Now you can use the Toolbar to post updates to Facebook and Tweet without ever leaving the page you are on. You can also easily keep track of what your friends or people you follow are saying, and be part of the conversation while you browse. And these are just the start, we have some big plans for 2010.

TIP: In the toolbar options menu you can choose to have the Alexa Toolbar appear as either a toolbar or sit in the status bar like Sparky does.

Reviews

While not completely new, 2009 saw the return of Alexa's website reviews. Now you can quickly and easily see what others are saying about the sites you're interested in, and you can write a review of your own. We also now rank reviewers based on how useful others think their reviews are, and you can view reviews by reviewer.

Find Sites About

We released a new type of search engine, one designed to help you find websites about a topic, as opposed to countless webpages about it. Often what you want is a webpage on a topic, and there are other search engines that are fantastic for that. What they're not so good at is recommending a websites about topics of interest to you, which is what the Alexa search is about.

New Traffic Stats

In 2009 we added three new metrics to our Traffic Stats: Bounce %, Time on Site, and Search %. These were intended to supplement our existing traffic numbers, the Alexa Traffic Rank, Reach, and Pageviews, and lead to a better understanding of a site's traffic. The Bounce % is an estimate of the percentage of visits to the site that result in a single pageview. The Time on Site is an estimate of the average amount of time for each visit to the site. The Search % is an estimate of the percentage of visits that came from search engines. The first two metrics, Bounce % and Time on Site, provide incites into how engaged the visitors to a given site are, while the Search % can tell you about the site's SEO.

Keywords

There's no denying the importance of search engines on the web, and if you are a business on the web then understanding how they drive traffic to your competitors can potentially give you an edge. So Alexa now provides you with estimates of the top 10 keywords driving traffic to a site, along with the top 30 high volume keywords.

Clickstream

Another competitive tool is the Clickstream, or Upstream/Downstream sites. These are lists of where visitors were directly before the came to a site, and then where they went when they left. If you are a business, it's a quick and easy way to see how well you are serving your customers. Are they leaving your website happy? Or are they moving on to a competitors site?

Demographics

Knowing how many people are visiting a site, how they're getting there, and where they're going next is important, but so is having an idea of who they are. So in 2009 we started making our Demographics data available. We break a site's audience up by age, gender, education location, and whether or not there are children in the household, and display the popularity of the site relative to the internet population as a whole.

Hot Pages/Hot Topics

Last, but not least, we added Hot Pages and Hot Topics. Now you can see what people have been searching for and what pages they've been visiting over the past hour, updated every five minutes. Personally I find it incredibly addictive, especially since they're also available directly from the Alexa Toolbar.

Whew, that's a lot of new stuff! Rest assured, though, we're not going to stop improving our site any time soon. I'm really excited about what we have planned for 2010, and I'm sure you will be too. Expect great things.

Network with the Alexa Toolbar for FireFox!

2009-12-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

If you use Twitter or Facebook, then we have something cool for you. I am happy to announce that we have released a new version of the Alexa Toolbar for Firefox. This new version supports an improved site stats button, and gives you direct access to both Twitter and Facebook while you browse.

Getting the Buttons

If you want to try the new buttons, the first thing you need to do is install or upgrade to the latest version of the Firefox toolbar. If you use IE don't worry, we will be adding them to the Alexa Toolbar for IE soon. Once installed you should see the new buttons at the right hand edge of the toolbar. If not, click on the little down arrow next to the Alexa icon and select "Add Buttons...". This will take you to Alexa's button page, where you can choose which ones you want to add. If you want to remove a button, choose "Organize Buttons..." from the Alexa icon drop down menu and select a button for removal. It's easy!

I know I am biased, but I really love the new social networking buttons. We've worked hard to create tools that we want to use ourselves, and I think we've come up with something that casual and power users alike will find useful. Of course we want to hear what you think, so please post your opinions (or bug reports) in our help forums.

Facebook

The Facebook button was designed to help you keep track of what your friends are saying, and allow you to interact with them without leaving the page you're currently on. Once you've logged in, which you might have to click on the button to do, you will see the profile photos of the last three posts to your News Feed (updated every 5 minutes) to the right of the Facebook icon. If you click on a photo, you can read the status update and any comments, like it, or leave a comment. As new comments appear, the Facebook logo will flare to let you know there is something new.

Clicking on the Facebook logo will allow you to post a link to the page you're currently on to your Facebook wall. Found something you like and want to share? Click the icon, write a message (or not), and share. It's easy, and you never have to leave the page you're on. Using the Facebook icon drop down menu, you can also refresh the faces, open up your wall, or log out of Facebook. This is my new favorite way to interact with Facebook, especially when I'm busy, and the button has even made some Facebook converts here at Alexa.

Twitter

The Twitter button is similar to the Facebook button, but designed with the idea that you're going to want to keep up with more than just the last few Tweets. If you're not already logged into Twitter, clicking on the icon will prompt you to. Once logged in, the icon's drop down menu will display the past 20 tweets from the people you follow (updated every five minutes). The Twitter icon will flare when there are new updates, and the drop down menu also allows you to refresh your feed.

Clicking in the Twitter icon will allow you to tweet directly from the toolbar, and if you want to add a bit.ly URL for the page you're currently on you can do that too. Adding the URL is optional, though, since tweeting is about more than just sharing content. We also don't prompt you to follow Alexa's Twitter feed, although you are welcome to if you want.

Site Stats

As with previous versions of the Alexa Toolbar, if you click on a site's Alexa Rank in the toolbar you will be taken to it's Site Info page on the Alexa website. Now, though, if you click on the site stats button, the toolbar will display a short highlight of the Site Info page. This means you can quickly and easily see how a site is ranked internationally, get an estimate of the number of sites linking to it (a measure of SEO), and get a little more insight into how well reviewed the site is. All without leaving the page that you're on.

I hope I was able to share some of the excitement I have over these new features. We're constantly trying to make the Alexa Toolbar more useful. Download the updated version now, and let us know what you think.

New Sites Linking In and Demographics data now live!

2009-12-03T16:00:00.000-08:00

In addition the the Alexa Traffic Rank, Alexa's Site Info pages provide a plethora of information about each site on the web. Two of our more popular data sets are Sites Linking In and Demographics, and we now have fresh data for both.

If you are interested in search engine optimization, or SEO, then you are no doubt familiar with how important sites linking in is to search engines such as Google. It's no secret that Google uses the number, and quality, of the pages that link to pages on your site to determine how important your content is. The more links from trusted pages to your page, the more your page is trusted. You can use Google to easily search for the number of pages linking to a page, but chances are doing that for every page on your site is going to be somewhere between tedious and impossible. But what if you want a higher level view of the topology of links leading to all the pages on your site? Well, that's what Alexa's Sites Linking In is, a count of the number of sites that contain links to the site of interest. The count isn't perfect, of course, the web is an immense and constantly evolving place. Still, you can compare the sites linking in for your site with your competitors, and see how your SEO efforts are stacking up. Are you ahead, or is it time to start working?

Which site is the winner, with the most sites linking in? That would be Google, the number one ranked site in the world also has the most sites linking to it.

The Demographics tab on the Alexa Site Info pages displays estimates of who makes up the audience of a given site, compared to everyone who surfs the web. So, if a site is listed as popular among those aged 18-24 and relatively unused by those 65+, it means the site appeals to a younger audience despite the fact that there tend to be more younger people online than older. For example, etrade.com (upper graph) is popular among younger people, presumably those trying to build their portfolio, while schwab.com (lower graph) is very popular among those thinking about retirement.

Alexa's demographics data often confirms what you might expect given the content of a site, but this can actually be a useful tool, especially when what you expect turns out to be off. If you have an idea of who your target audience is, compare it to Alexa's Demographics data and see if it matches. Do you know your audience? Or is there a segment you were missing? Now, do the same for your competitors. Does your idea of their target audience match the data? And are your competitors better at attracting your audience? If so, it's probably time to start asking why.

Move over Sparky, there's now a full fledged Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

2009-11-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

I am happy to report that you can now download an Alexa toolbar for Firefox with the same look and feel as the toolbar for IE. Previously, the Alexa Toolbar for Firefox, nicknamed "Sparky", displayed data in the status bar of your browser. Sparky is useful for quickly checking how popular a site is without adding an extra row of buttons to your browser, and it will continue to be available to download from Alexa and Mozilla. But people have been asking for a version similar to what you can install for IE, and now it is available.

For those not familiar with the IE version of the Alexa Toolbar, it has a number of cool and useful features. It installs near the top of your browser, just like a standard toolbar. It displays the Alexa Traffic Rank for the site you are currently browsing, has a drop-down menu for related sites, and a button that takes you to the Wayback Machine and archived versions of the site. The toolbar also displays which web pages and what topics are hot on the web right now, in real time, so you can easily keep track of what's new and interesting on the web as you surf. Lastly, the toolbar shows you how well the site is reviewed at Alexa, and gives you the opportunity to write a review right there with the toolbar.

So, this is all great stuff, but there's yet another reason to install the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa ranks websites, and one of ways we know which sites are popular is the highly anonymous toolbar data. So, when you surf the web with your Alexa Toolbar, you are anonymously casting votes for which sites you like. There's no need to be a super influential blogger, have a million followers on twitter, or spend hours digging things to have your voice heard. All you need to do is surf the web with an Alexa Toolbar installed. It's easy.

As you visit websites with an Alexa Toolbar installed, you are also contributing to the related links you see in your toolbar and on alexa.com. Conversely, when you look at related links you are looking at what people similar to yourself find interesting. By browsing with the toolbar you are helping others find interesting things, just as they are hopefully helping you. Alexa data is, ultimately, your data. We're just here to help you make sense of it while protecting your anonymity.

So what about spyware? This is coming up less and less, but I occasionally get asked if Alexa is spyware or not. Does the Alexa toolbar collect data about where you are browsing? Yes, but only if you decide to "opt in" and install the toolbar. There are no secrets here, we try to be as up front as possible about the fact that you are sending us information. By installing the toolbar, you help us help you find better content, and have a richer browsing experience. There is nothing malicious or mysterious going on, and certainly nothing sinister enough to warrant the toolbar being labeled spyware or adware or whatever. Alexa and the Alexa toolbar are about helping people find interesting and useful content on the web. Alexa's data is of the people, for the people, the wisdom of crowds at work. Download the Alexa Toolbar, and see for yourself.

Alexa in Chinese continues to grow

2009-10-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

59E4ZA2KEN8E

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!

2009-10-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

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.

The new and improved Alexa Toolbar

2009-08-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

Not that long ago we released version 9 of the Alexa toolbar, which had a number of cool new features. But like most things there was room for improvement, and we were lucky enough to get some very constructive feedback on how to make the toolbar better. We listened, and today I am happy to announce a new version of the Alexa toolbar that incorporates many of those suggestions.

Highlights of the improvements include

the toolbar no longer opens links in new windows
the toolbar highlights fresher information in the form of Hot Pages and Hot Topic
the visual footprint is reduced
improved performance and stability

One of the biggest changes visually is the toolbar now features the Alexa Hot Pages and Alexa Hot Topics. Clicking on either icon will take you to Alexa's What's Hot page, where you get a real time view into what is popular on the web right now. You can get lists of hot pages and hot topics by clicking the small arrows next to the respective icons, or go directly to the top page or topics by clicking on their names.

Other features of the toolbar remain in icon form. For whatever site you are on you can visit the Alexa site information page for it, see its rank and related links, visit it in the past using the Wayback Machine, or write a review.

If you are a toolbar user and want to upgrade, or if you are interested in checking it out, all you need to do is visit the Alexa toolbar download page and follow the instructions there. Sorry, the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer at the moment. If you are a Firefox user then you should check out Sparky, the Alexa Firefox addon.

And if you want your input to be part of the next toolbar release, then visit our Alexa toolbar help forums and let us know what you think.

What's Hot?

2009-08-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

Do you enjoy keeping up with what's hot on the web right now? Then you really need to check out the new What's Hot feature at Alexa.

What's Hot improves upon our existing Hot URLs. Now you can not only see, in real time, which pages on the Internet are the most popular, but also what topics people are interested in. Right now I am seeing kate gosselin, ted kennedy, and michael jackson (among others), although the list will obviously be different when you look because it is updated every 5 minutes.

Knowing what topics are popular is good, of course, and knowing what they are in real time is better. But there are plenty of other places on the web to see lists of what people are currently buzzing about. The question is, what if I want to know why something is popular as well? Well, if you click on a Hot Topic, we'll send you to a list of pages that people are visiting right now to make that topic hot. Instead of scratching your head and wondering what a popular word or phrase means, you can dive straight into the action.

We also still have the Alexa Hot URLs, although they have been renamed "Hot Pages." We renamed them because we wanted to emphasize that it's the content, not the URL, that is popular. As always, the Alexa Hot Pages let you know what is popular and interesting on the web right now.

Your Customers are Talking. Are You Listening? Alexa Website Reviews are Back.

2009-07-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

In business, reputation is a currency that is not easily accumulated, and easily lost. It can make or break a business. Online, this is more true than ever, with social media acting as an amplifier you can quickly find your brand in the midst of a public relations nightmare. Anger the wrong customer, or ignore too many customer complaints and you may learn this lesson the hard way.

United Airlines learned this lesson when they failed to settle a claim for a guitar reportedly damaged by baggage handlers. Unfortunately for United, the customer was a talented musician with a flair for social media. He wrote a song, United Breaks Guitars, and posted it on YouTube. After just two weeks the video has been viewed over 2 million times. Similarly, Urban Outfitters has been on the receiving end of a viral complaint of stealing other people's designs. When the complaints went unheeded the complainers went public with Urban Counterfitters.com

Smart businesses know that they need to manage their PR and often have a person dedicated to responding to blog posts, and posting in forums to participate, spin, and hopefully mitigate any damage that can be done by negative online posts. They also know that customer service is an increasingly important front in the Public Relations battleground. Any customer can potentially take a complaint viral.

But social media is by no means a bad deal for all brands. Many companies have benefited from socially engaged customers who rave about their products online. Keep your customers delighted and you could benefit from the best kind of PR: free unsolicited customer reviews.

All of this is a round-about way to get to the point of this blog post, Alexa's Reviews. Many of you may remember a few years ago when Alexa had a vast database of website reviews... tens of thousands of reviews for thousands of different websites large and small. Alexa was a clearinghouse of sorts for customer rants and raves and was the destination of choice for Web surfers who wanted to express an opinion about an online brand. Sadly, for technical reasons the reviews were taken offline. But today I am thrilled to announce that they are back.

So what's new? First and foremost, all of the previous reviews are available on Alexa again. Take a look here at the reviews for ign.com. Secondly, you can now create accounts and log in to Alexa with an Alexa login or a Facebook login. Your reviews will all be aggregated under you account and you can click on the names of reviewers to see other reviews that they have written.

For companies large and small, Alexa is once again a necessary stop for all smart brands that know how to manage their online reputation. Whether you run a personal blog or you run a major online operation, Alexa can give you some insight into what your customers are saying about you after they hang up the phone. Are your customers acting as ambassadors of your brand or critics? The answer to that question can make all the difference between success and failure.

Are you listening?

How To Increase The Traffic To Your Website

2009-07-07T14:44:00.000-07:00

I get asked this all the time, whether via Alexa's forums, or after work by my friends: How do I get more traffic to my Web site? I wish there was just some simple button that I could tell people to push and that it would solve all their traffic issues. But it doesn't exist; if it did, everybody would already be using it.

But there are whole heaps of great advice, which if followed, will lead to more visitors to your site. What follows is a simple to follow list of best practices to help get you on your way.

1. On-Site Factors. Start with your site. You need to make it the best it can be. So that it will be attractive to visitors AND search engines.

Keywords. What is your site about? Find a few key words and phrases that you think describe your site and that people may actually enter into a search box on Google. If you pick very popular keywords and phrases, you might be disappointed. Millions of people will search for those keywords and phrases, but you will be way down the search results because lots of sites are optimized for those phrases. If you pick less popular keywords and phrases, you may have a shot of actually showing up in the search results because fewer sites have optimized for those keywords and phrases.

Optimize Your Site. Use your keywords and phrases on your site. Put them in the title of your page, in the H1 tags, metatags and throughout your site. Use them in the text of links that point to your page. Shoot for having keyword density of about 6%.

Have Good Content. You should strive to have something new on your site once per day. Don't let your site get stale... Google's algorithms will notice and so will visitors to your site. If you don't have a lot of time to create unique content every day, consider putting up a daily poll, creating a forum on your site, or leaving a comments field/Guest Book for visitors to fill out. If you use Twitter or Facebook, you can have your updates automatically appear on your site.

Unique Value Proposition. Give something away on your site to your visitors to remember you by. Otherwise people may forget your site and won't come back. You can find interesting content on widgetbox.com, or you can give them a custom Alexa Toolbar. Just give them something.

Create A Sitemap. Every time you update content on your site you should update your sitemap and submit the site map to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.. There are lots of free sitemap tools out there. Find one and get started. It is a great way to let Google know when your site is updated.

Return Visitors. How are you going to get people to return to your site after they have left? You may want to consider an e-mail newsletter. But don't spam... please. If people like your content let them sign up to get your newsletter. You should also allow people to subscribe to your updates via facebook or twitter. Most blogs offer easy plugins for this feature.

Link Bait. People love lists. Make lists of things that are relevant to your site and put them on your site, like top ten fishing sites. Then let the sites in your list know you have made your list. They may take that list and put it on their site... Or give out awards like "fishing site of the week." which brings us to...

2. Off-Site Factors. Once you have a great site you need to start thinking about other factors, mostly links. If nobody links to your site you are going to have a tough time getting seen in Google's results. More links = better placement in Google. So how do you get links?

Link Number One. The first link is easy. Alexa already has a link to your site, and Alexa's page rank is high, so the link from Alexa counts more than most. You just need to let Google know that Alexa has a link to your site. How do you do that? Install the Google Toolbar then visit Alexa. But be sure to put your Alexa Toolbar back!

Get Listed In Directories. Directories that are relevant to your site are generally more important than others, so if your site is about basket weaving, find a basket weaving directory and ask them to list your site. Get listed in as many as possible. And then find other general directories like DMOZ and get listed there. Are there Wikipedia articles that should list your site as a place for more information on a topic? Get listed.

Participate In Social Media. Find forums that are relevant to your content and participate... a lot. Update your signature footer on the forum to include a link to your site. Use Twitter, Facebook, Digg, but, in all cases, do not just post or write about your own site. Nobody cares. Write and post about things that you care about, sometimes your site, and people who like your posts may make their way over to your site.

Have Something Newsworthy. If you have something newsworthy, don't just blog about it. First post it as a press release on your site, then update your sitemap, then post it to the newswires, then submit it to ezine articles, Article Base and/or Go Articles, then blog about it, twitter about it, etc. If you do it right you will have at least a couple of new links to your site, and if you do it really right you could have dozens of new links.

Advertise. There are lots of great advertising solutions out there. Google AdWords is a great place to start and, if done well, can offer you a good deal on targeted traffic. Display advertising can be effective and affordable as well. The social networks are now offering do-it-yourself advertising at reasonable prices, and even Alexa allows you to advertise at inexpensive CPMs.

And, as always, install the Alexa Toolbar. It won't increase the traffic to your site, but it won't hurt and you will be helping Alexa to track your site and helping the entire Internet Community by contributing to Alexa's Traffic Data.

Getting more traffic to your site is a journey. Take the first steps today, and with a little hard work and some luck, you will be counting your visitors in the millions before too long.

Facebook Juggernaut Overtakes YouTube

2009-06-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

Observant tweeter nametrader noticed that Facebook has been continuing its rise up the rankings and has recently unseated YouTube to become the 3rd most popular site on the Web according to Alexa's Daily Rankings yesterday. Take a look at the graph below showing the daily reach for Facebook (in blue) and YouTube.

Next up for Facebook? Google and Yahoo:
I don't expect Facebook to pass Yahoo (in Red) any time soon, but if the current trend holds Facebook could pass Yahoo by March of next year and may actually catch Google six months after that.

Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com - Followup

2009-05-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to quickly follow up on my previous post about bit.ly and tinyurl.com on May 7. At the time of that post Tinyurl was the undisputed king of the hill of all the URL shorteners (sites that take your long URLs and make them short for convenient posting to blogs, facebook, twitter, etc..) I predicted that Twitter's switch from Tinyurl as the default URL shortener to Bit.ly was going to upset Tinyurl's leadership position. So how did I do?

Take a look at the Daily Pageviews graph below.

In just one short month Bit.ly has gone from having 1/3 of the pageviews of Tinyurl to having 30% more.

When it comes to pageviews, Bit.ly is now king of the hill.

When it comes to visitors, Tinyurl still wins, but not for long. Alexa's Daily Reach graph indicates a steady decline in Tinyurl visitors and a meteoric rise for Bit.ly. In just two more weeks Bit.ly will take over to become the undisputed king of the URL shortening hill.

I am not acquainted with the details of the deal between Twitter and Bit.ly, or the reasons behind the switch from Tinyurl, but I am certain of this. This seemingly minor change represents a big deal to both Tinyurl and Bit.ly.

New Help and Forums on Alexa

2009-05-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

Today Alexa has released new community features in our help section. The goal is to provide an environment where community members can freely exchange thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and opinions. To get started, go to http://www.alexa.com/help. From there you can browse the forums, post new topics and reply to topics that have been posted by others. We will be checking in on the forums on a regular basis to pitch in answers and to hear what you have to say.

It is our hope that you find the new help and forums to be both easy to use and helpful to you as you make use of Alexa's products and services. We place tremendous value on this environment as a medium of information exchange and connection point for you, your peers, and the Alexa team.

Check it out now and let us know what you think.

Search Engine Optimization Companies

2009-05-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

Alexa's CEO, Niall O'Driscoll, once said to me "If you want to know how good a search engine optimization company is, type 'search engine optimization' into Google and see who comes up first." The logic is infallible. The same logic applies to Dentists and Barbers... if you walk into a barbershop and the barber has awful hair, walk out.

So I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at three of the leading Search Engine Optimization sites out there, seochat.com, seobook.com and seomoz.org, and see what they do and how well they practice what they preach.

As a point of comparison, and to make sure this test is somewhat fair, each of the sites have similar traffic, with 3 month Alexa Ranks between 3500 and 2500, and daily visits between an average of 75K to 120K.

Test 1: Who ranks best for "search engine optimization"

Try it yourself. Search for "search engine optimization" on Google and see which of the three sites comes up first. Seochat comes up as the third result on the page, behind wikipedia and behind a Google article on search engine optimization. Seobook.com and seomoz.org are farther down the rankings. The graph below confirms it, seochat gets a much larger percent of their traffic from search engines than its competitors:

Surprisingly, to me anyway, seochat.com also wins this contest if you search for "seo".

Test 1 Winner: seochat.com

Test 2: Who has the most "high quality" links?
If you want traffic from Google you are going to have to work on more than your keywords. You are going to have to get a lot of high quality links pointing to your site. That, in short, is how Google will know whether your site is important or not, and it is how Google decides which site with the "right" keywords appears at the top of the results. So how did our sites do?

Let me give you a little help reading this graph. I have broken links into three types, ranging from most important (Links in Top 1,000) at the top, to least important (Links in Top 100,000) at the bottom. Starting at the top, you can see the seomoz.org wins the most links from sites that are in the Top 1,000. Seomoz.org also has the most links overall, giving it an important edge in search engine rankings.

Test 2 Winner: seomoz.org

Test 3: Which site has the most appeal?
Sometimes we can get so wrapped up talking about "keyword optimization" and "link building strategies" that we can forget about perhaps the most important factor of all. Appeal -- that certain "something" that keeps people on your page and keeps them coming back. How else are you going to get links to your site and get more traffic if your site lacks appeal?

But how do you measure appeal? I like to measure appeal with Bounce Rate (do people "bounce" away after visiting) and Time on Site. How did our sites do? Let's start with bounce rate:

With bounce rate a lower number is better, indicating that few people "bounce". It looks like all of these sites have a relatively high bounce rate, at 50% or above, with seobook.com with the largest bounce rate, at 70%. Before being too hard on seobook.com, their bounce rate is no doubt due to the "hard sell" interstitial sales technique that they use on their site. The first time I saw that form I was inclined to hit the back button, and if others do the same it will cause seobook.com's bounce rate to rise. But what is unknown to me, and perhaps more important than a good bounce rate, is how well seobook.com converts visitors to leads via this method.

One of the consequences of search engine optimization is that as you get really good at it your bounce rate is likely to go up. It might take a second for that to sink in. Your bounce rate will go up because you will be getting more and more traffic from search, and it will be less targeted traffic. All of these new visitors to your site are less likely to stick around and become customers.

Next up on our measure of appeal is Time on Site. How did our sites do?

With "Time on Site" you want to have a larger number, indicating that people are sticking around, making pageturns and hopefully becoming customers. What stands out here is that seobook.com has the lowest time on site, by a long shot. Again, this is likely due to their aggressive interstitial. The winner of the Time on Site category is seomoz.org with over 4.5 minutes on average.

Appeal is what I would call a leading indicator. If you score well in these areas you are likely to garner more links and have a shot at the top of the rankings. It is where people should start first when looking at their Internet Marketing efforts... building a site with content that people want to link to and come back to.

Test 3 winner: seomoz.org

Overall Winner
So who is the overall winner? The site with the most traffic wins, and that site is:

Surprise: seobook.com

Despite losing each of our three tests, seobook.com gets more traffic than seochat.com and seomoz.org. But how do they do it? Loyalty. Despite getting less traffic from search engines, and despite having fewer links than seomoz, and despite scaring away potential customers with aggressive marketing, seobook is doing quite well. They are converting visitors to customers, and turning those customers into regular visitors.

The take-away lesson is that good SEO is important, but it can't compete with a loyal and engaged user-base. Seobook.com is a perfect case in point.

Movie Websites: Good Predictor of Box Office

2009-05-18T14:16:00.001-07:00

When I looked through the Alexa Movers and Shakers this morning I noticed that we had some movie websites in the list and it reminded me of a post I've been meaning to do for some time now, comparing traffic to the movie website to box office. I have speculated that traffic to a movie website will be a good predictor of its opening box office. Let's take a look.

Angels & Demons vs. Star Trek

For the purposes of this comparison I am going to look at peak traffic to the movie website(s) and at opening weekend box office.

Star Trek's opening weekend is the clear winner with almost 40% more box office. But is the same true if you look at peak traffic to the website?

Yes. Star Trek (startrekmovie.com) clearly received more daily peak pageviews than Angels & Demons (angelsanddemons.com). The peak day for traffic to movie sites is typically Friday of the opening weekend, as it was in both of these cases.

OK, that was fun, but let's take another recent set of movies and see if the theory holds up.

17 Again vs. Monsters vs. Aliens

Clear winner in box office dollars is Monsters vs. Aliens. What about the movie websites?

The theory holds up. If a movie website gets more traffic it is going to rake in more at the box office. I'll keep my eyes open for an exception to this rule. Night at the Museum is coming out this weekend and judging from its website traffic it will have a great opening weekend... you heard it here first.

Rich | Poor

2009-05-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be interesting to look at two different types of sites today, ones that attract a wealthy audience, and ones that attract the poor.

$Rich

I picked 5 sites that have an audience heavily skewed toward the wealthy, including linkedin.com, wsj.com, expedia.com, yelp.com and cbssports.com. These sites appear to have nothing in common. But dig a little deeper and you see that they all attract a very wealthy audience, consisting largely of people making over $100K per year.

So how do they do it? How do these sites attract a wealthy audience. They each appeal to different aspects of a wealthy lifestyle. Linked in appeals to business people. Wall Street Journal appeals to people with investments. Expedia appeals to people who can afford to travel. Yelp appeals to people who eat out a lot. CBS Sports... well that one is a mystery to me.

Poor

Here we have five sites that are skewed toward people earning less than $30k per year, including mininova.org, onemanga.com, gamefaqs.com, y8.com and ultimate-guitar.com. You may not have heard of these sites before, but they are all very popular sites, each getting in excess of 3 million unique visitors per month. So why haven't you heard of them? I know a little something about Alexa's demographics and the reason you haven't heard of these sites is because you, a reader of the Alexa Blog, are unlikely to be under the age of 25 or earn less than $30k per year.

So what do these sites do that attracts the young and poor? Mininova is a "torrent" download site where people can go to find free downloads, mostly of movies. The mere mention of the word torrent sends the older and wealthy crowd running in the opposite direction. In contrast, Hulu, which is a free video site where people can watch TV shows and movies, appeals to the wealthy with its clean and simple interface and no mention of torrents. One Manga, the second site on our poor list is a Japanese comics site, which as you can imagine appeals to the younger crowd. Game FAQs is a community help site about video games. Y8 is a free online game site. Ultimate Guitar is a free sheet music site geared toward aspiring rock stars.

Advertisers are a pretty smart bunch and they know who it is they want to reach. You won't find any Lexus ads on the poor sites and conversely, you won't find any Taco Bell ads on the Rich sites. Each site's demographics determines who will want to advertise there. The question for you is what kind of site are you building and who will it attract? The answer to that question will ultimately decide who will be willing to advertise on your site and how much money you can potentially earn via advertising.

Battle of the URL Shorteners

2009-05-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

In the social web it seems there is nothing quite as fun as sharing URLs. With the rise of sites like Twitter, which limits communications to only 140 characters, and the often long length of URLs, there is a new breed of sites coming online that shorten URLs into tiny snippets of their former selves.

Take this URL for example, on Yahoo! about the Manny Ramirez drug scandal: http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ys-ramirezsuspension050709&prov=yhoo&type=lgns. If you were to post that URL to Twitter, 85 or your 140 character limit would already be used up, leaving you just 55 characters to type in your witty comment.

Along come the URL shorteners. Go to Tinyurl.com, copy that 85 character long Yahoo! URL into the text box, click the "Make Tiny URL" button, and receive this alternative tiny URL, http://tinyurl.com/cmrt9s, just 25 characters in length. That leaves me with 120 characters for my witty remarks.

Tinyurl has been around the Web for a long time, well before twitter came along. It has been a simple and single-purpose website. But, now that Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and so many other social sites have reached the big time, something new is happening. The sharing of URLs has reached critical mass, and services like Tinyurl have an opportunity to grow into something altogether new.

The sharing of URLs online is no longer just random unimportant noise. It is news. It is a pulse, indicating what is happening in a society. Take Tweetmeme for example. They get it. They treat all URLs shared via Twitter as news, and sort the most popular shared URLs to the top. Go to Tweetmeme any time of day and you can see what the society thinks is important right now, at this particular moment. That is because what we share via Twitter, in aggregate, is news.

Does Tinyurl understand how sites like Twitter have changed what it means to be an URL shortener? Upstart URL shortener Bit.ly seems to get it. They understand that the act of sharing an URL is an explicit act indicating interest in an URL and that there is more to be done with that information. Here are some new features of Bit.ly that prove my point:

Bit.ly remembers the URLs I've shortened. When I go back to Bit.ly they are all there for me to peruse.
Clicking on "info" shows me stats for the shortened URL. How many times was it clicked? Where were people located geographically when they clicked my url? What services were people on when they on when they clicked my shortened url? Who else shortened that URL. And so much more.
Bit.ly submits all shortened urls to OpenCalais to be semantically classified, categorized and tagged.

There are a number of other URL shorteners out there with other interesting and sometimes even funny features (I'm talking about you, I CAN HAZ dot COM.) I mention Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com specifically because Twitter recently switched from using Tinyurl's URL shortening service to Bit.ly. Now, when you type a long URL into Twitter, it will automatically shorten that URL for you using Bit.ly.

Until now, Tinyurl has been the biggest of the URL shorteners by a comfortable margin. I suspect, with this recent change by Twitter, more people are going to see the advantages of Bit.ly and start switching over. It won't happen overnight, but having Twitter repeatedly show your URL to millions daily is bound to have an effect on users. Looking at the chart to the left you can see the relative size of the two services, Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com, measured in visitors, and the amount of overlap between the two. Two months from now I expect that green circle to be a lot larger.

Another less discussed effect of having Twitter default to Bit.ly as an URL shortener is the profound effect it will have on Bit.ly's search engine placement. Search engines always try to sort the important links to the top, and one of the most important measures of a site/link's importance is the number of links pointing to it (this is a somewhat simplified explanation, but mostly right.)

As you can see from the data below, Tinyurl.com has been benefiting from the Twitter relationship.

Number of sites linking to Tinyurl.com and Bit.ly that are in the Alexa Top 1000:

Tinyurl - 386
Bit.ly - 9

The net result of this difference in number of highly ranked links is that Tinyurl has been doing well in search engines, while Bit.ly has not. Tinyurl gets an estimated 530K visits via search per month, while Bit.ly gets approximately 56K.

Bit.ly will soon have tens of millions of links being pointed to it, all because somebody typed some link into Twitter, Twitter turned it into a Bit.ly URL, and somebody shared that shortened URL on a page, whether Twitter, Facebook, Digg, a personal blog or other. Soon, all the search engines will see Bit.ly as an important Web presence, causing it to get even more traffic from search. It is a virtuous circle and Bit.ly is the beneficiary.

It is still way to early to call a winner here, but the next six months will be an interesting time as these URL shorteners reinvent what it means to be an URL shortener, fight over market share, and come up with business models that allow them to sustain their business for the long haul.

Don't Forget Your Mom This Sunday...

2009-04-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

We've done a few posts about the flower sites in the past, including "Mothers and Sweethearts" and "Which is More Popular: Mother's Day of Valentine's Day?"

If you take a look at the traffic to two of the major flower sites shown on the left you'll see that they get the majority of their traffic on two hallmark-made holidays, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

Taking a closer look at the graph above, there are some interesting things to note about the two sites, Proflowers.com and 1800flowers.com. Proflowers, shown in red above, has been trailing behind 1800flowers for years, consistently pulling between 50% and 75% as much traffic. But as of February this is no longer true. This Valentine's Day Proflowers saw an almost 60% increase in Year over Year traffic, besting 1800flowers by 40%.

Here's the kicker: Proflower's increase in traffic didn't come from search.

Take a look at the (messy) graph to the right. It shows the percent of traffic to our flower sites that comes from search. You can see Proflowers (in red), which has historically relied heavily on search engine marketing, is now getting less of their traffic from search. 1800 flowers on the other hand has stepped up their Search Engine Marketing and is now getting more traffic than ever from search engines.

Search Engine Marketing is often seen as the key factor to driving more traffic. But as Proflowers proves, there are other ways to generate traffic. How did they do it? They have gone old-school with a large-scale radio campaign signing a number of endorsement deals with radio hosts. Who says radio is dead?

Quick reminder: don't forget your Mom -- Mother's Day is just around the corner.

Why Does My Alexa Rank Jump Around? A: The Long Tail

2009-04-27T16:04:00.000-07:00

By now we have all heard of the long tail, which has been used to metaphorically describe just about everything from income distribution to traffic on the Web. Originally coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired article, it refers to a frequency distribution with a long tail, sometimes also referred to as a power law graph. On the Web we have a very long tail, and it means that there are relatively few sites with a lot of traffic and endless numbers of sites with low traffic... the long tail.

While most of us can claim that we understand the meaning of the long tail, it is still often hard to comprehend how this applies to us. I refer specifically to Web site owners with low traffic who see their traffic rank jump around a lot. I was poking around the blogosphere today and ran into this blog entry, the Alexa Experiment. Over the years I have seen a few others like it. Her complaint is that her Alexa rank jumps around quite a bit... in his case from 3.5 million on day 1 of her experiment to 2.8 million on day 13. She uses this as evidence that the Alexa Rank can't be relied upon.

Forgetting about the relative merit of the Alexa Rankings for the moment, a perfect ranking system, one with perfect information about all sites, would tend to behave in the same way. Why? The long tail.

In any ordinal ranking system, like the Alexa Rank, sites out on the long tail will experience massive changes in rank regardless of their actual number of visits, visitors and pageviews. The reason for the fluctuation is because the farther you go out onto the tail the flatter it gets.

I'll use 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.

If we examine the person ranked at #50 million, let's postulate that she earned $50,000 per year last year, and that she will earn $50,000 again next year. Question: Will she still be ranked at #50 million next year? No. In a shrinking economy her ranking is going to improve because millions of people earned less. Conversely, in a growing economy her position will fall as millions of other workers earning improve. 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 more likely it is that there are others earning the exact same amount as her. In her case it could be hundreds or thousands of people. Earning just one dollar more per year can vault her position in the rankings much farther than you may expect.

The point is that the farther you go out on the tail, the less is required to move up an ordinal rank. In a system with a distribution like traffic on the Web this is especially true. 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.

That's the nature of the long tail. It is very flat and moving horizontally is not all that hard until you begin to approach the head. For the folks who are running an Alexa Experiment, I wish them the best of luck. But your time would be better spent finding ways to increase your visitors, visits and pageviews. Your Alexa Rank will follow.

Get Rich From Your Blog - Is It Realistic?

2009-04-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

Not a day goes by that I don't see a story about making money on the Internet with a blog. It goes something like this:

Step 1: Start writing a blog
Step 2: Put some Google ads on it
Step 3: Sit back and start counting the money

This pitch isn't just limited to the spam that comes pouring into my in-box every day. It often comes from industry publications and reputable Marketing organizations.

But is it true? Is this a gold rush? eMarketer estimates that online ad spending will grow, even in this down economy, to an impressive $24.5 billion this year. That is a lot of dough, and surely some of it will go to the bloggers. But how much? Let's do some math.

Just to thumbnail sketch the landscape, there are well over 50 million unique sites and blogs out there that have some sort of measurable traffic... quadruple that number if you count the sites and blogs that have never seen a visitor. But for the sake of argument let's call it an even 50 million. What would happen if I could magically split the pot of $25 billion evenly among all sites? We would get $500 each.

It won't even pay your Comcast Internet bill.

But traffic on the Web is not divided evenly, and neither are the dollars. The top sites get more than their share. Take a look at the chart on the right for a peek at how traffic is divided up on the web. The Top 100K sites, which represent just a tiny fraction of all the sites on the web (less than .2%) get almost 75% of the traffic. And top sites have sales people who can make sales calls, take ad buyers out to lunch and put together fancy PowerPoint slides. Never underestimate the power of a good PowerPoint slide.

Those top sites are going to take the lion's share of that $25 billion.

Let's take a look at this from another angle. I read an estimate in eMarketer today that the average price for online advertising is currently $2.50 for a thousand impressions (called CPM in the industry parlance.) But that includes the premium prices that the Top Sites charge. What kind of prices do the smaller sites get for their advertising? Pubmatic can tell you in their Quarterly Ad Price Index. Pubmatic manages the advertising for thousands of sites, large and small, so they have some pretty good data. The answer is $.61.

That means that you will get paid 61 cents for every thousand page views on your blog. You can put 4 ads on your blog, bringing your take home to $2.50 per thousand, but beware because you may lose your readers if you overdo it. How many thousands of page views does your blog have per month?

Let's take one of the much touted success stories, The Daily Coyote. The Daily Coyote is a fine blog and the author, Shreve Stockton, takes beautiful photos and has a real passion for her topic. I checked a number of different sources for The Daily Coyote's estimated traffic, and came up with 90,000 page views per month. Assuming the page view count is right, how much does The Daily Coyote bring in?: (90,000 page views per month) * ($2.50 per thousand views) = $225.00 per month. For additional context her blog has an Alexa Rank of 157,000, which is impressive by most standards, and a nearly impossible goal for all but the most successful bloggers.

Speaking of successful bloggers, let's take a look at Om Malik's blog. Estimates say he gets about a million views per month. So, assuming he makes typical CPMs (I would bet he does a bit better...), how much money does this highly successful blog with an Alexa Rank of 13,000 bring in? $2500 per month.

So, what is a poor blogger to do? Do it for the love, not the advertising dollars. Or use your blog to promote something that actually does make money, like a plumbing business, or a bike rental shop. If you do it because you think there is some sort of gold rush going on with advertising dollars on blogs you should think again.

Alexa and the Love You've Been Looking For

2009-04-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

By now you've heard about what's new over at Alexa. In addition to the traffic metrics you already use, we've begun serving up Demographics, Clickstreams, and measures of Search Traffic for virtually any site on the web. Understanding the demographics can be a bit daunting at first, so in today's post we'll explore what the demographics data are all about, and then we'll have some fun seeing who goes where on the web.

The secret to understanding the demographics is this: for any given category, a site's demographics score is the ratio of that category's representation in the site's audience, to that category's representation in the total population of folks who use the internet. That's a mouthful, and I learn best from simple examples, so let's explore the meaning of that statement with a goofy scenario. Let's pretend that the internet is used by just two types of people: the Greens and the Reds. And let's say that the entire population of people who use the internet consists of just six Greens and eight Reds, like in the picture at left.

Now let's imagine a hypothetical site on our tiny internet: ilovegreen.com, and let's suppose that the audience for this site consists of the three Greens and two Reds shown in the picture at right. What would Alexa say about the popularity of ilovegreen.com among the demographic of Green users? Well Greens visit the site at a rate of 3-to-2, while they are represented on the web in general at a rate of just 6-to-8. If you like math, you can divide these rates to see that Greens visit ilovegreen.com at a proportionally higher rate than they surf the web in general; in this simple example, Greens are over-represented in ilovegreen.com's audience by exactly a factor of two. In other words, ilovegreen.com is popular among Greens. (Don't worry: if you don't like math, you'll see below that we publish our demographics data as a handy graphic which captures all the raw numbers in an intuitive way.)

Remember, the fact that this hypothetical site scores high with Greens doesn't tell you about the absolute number of Greens who visit the site. What it does tell you is that Greens are represented in the site's audience to a much greater extent than they are represented out there on the web in general. In that sense, this site is preferred by Greens.

Now that we've gotten the hard part out of the way, let's have some fun. First, let's check out some sites for which we might already have pretty good guesses as to their demographics. In the charts below, a red bar pointing to the left means a category is proportionally under-represented in a site's audience; a green bar pointing to the right means a category is over-represented. So how about ufc.com, the homepage of the Ultimate Fighting Championship?

No surprises here: ufc.com is overwhelmingly preferred by young men. That is to say, men between the ages of 25 to 34 are strongly over-represented in the audience of ufc.com, compared to how they are represented on the internet at large. For the most part, these young men have college educations (or at least they're working on it), they tend not to have kids, and when they're surfing the web for news about, say, Yoshihiro Akiyama (one of the biggest mixed martial arts stars in Asia) they're doing it from home.

Now how about a site on the opposite end of the spectrum? Here are the demographics for nordstrom.com:

I know my sister spends a lot of time there, and apparently she's not alone. The audience for nordstrom.com contains college-educated, 25 to 34 year old women to a much greater extent than does the general internet population. And they tend to do their shopping from work! I'm sure it's on their lunch breaks...

A couple of more no-brainers, while we're at it. What do you suppose is the age distribution for folks who frequent the official website the U.S. Social Security Administration?

You guessed it: the users of ssa.gov skew toward web-surfers in their golden years. And what about folks at the other end of life's journey? Well, you might guess that their parents do some browsing over at landofnod.com, a retail site specializing in kids' furniture. So what do our data have to say about landofnod.com's audience?

Sure enough, they've got kids.

But enough confirming what we might already have guessed. Alexa's all about web discovery, right? Let's do some discovering. One thing folks certainly use the internet for is to find... each other. Three of the big players in the internet dating game are match.com (Alexa rank 359), chemistry.com (Alexa rank 6,517), and plentyoffish.com (Alexa rank 410).

Now imagine you're searching for that special someone, and you want to stand out among all the riff-raff. Check out the gender distribution of match.com:

Men and women are represented at match.com in almost equal proportion to their representation on the internet at large. For a high traffic site, that means there are plenty of men and plenty of women -- so if you're a man trying to stand out among men, or a women trying to stand out among women, you're out of luck. But never fear! Alexa's here to help you, ahem, improve the odds.

Compare the gender distribution of chemistry.com:

to that of plentyoffish.com:

Compared to the general internet population, women are over-represented at chemistry.com, while men are over-represented at plentyoffish.com. So if you're looking for boys, go where the boys are. And if you're looking for girls, go where the girls are!

Perhaps this wasn't what you had in mind when we said that Alexa's data gives you a competitive edge, but then again, who's complaining?

The Alexa toolbar, and why it's so cool

2009-04-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

If you've visited Alexa recently you've probably noticed the ads for the free Alexa toolbar. You also might have even wondered why you should bother downloading and installing it. After all, do you really need another toolbar? Hopefully I can convince you that the answer is yes, and for a variety of reasons why.

The Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer gives you quick and easy access to considerable amount of metadata about the website you are currently visiting. If you click on the down arrow next to the "info" button you will get a synopsis of of site's contact information, traffic rank, and other sites stats. If you click on the info button itself, you will see the site information page at alexa.com for the website. This is nice if you find a new site that looks interesting, and you want to quickly see how popular it is and how long it has been around (especially if you are thinking about giving them your credit card number). Next to the info button is the site's rank, along with an icon indicating the recent trend (a green up arrow indicates that the site is getting more popular while a red down arrow indicates fewer visitors recently). Next on the toolbar is a list of related links, with are other websites popular among the users of the site you are currently visiting. Lastly, if you type something into the search box you will see results from the Alexa Site Finder which I blogged about previously. All of this together makes the Alexa toolbar a fantastic way to find new websites about the things you are interested in.

There is also an Alexa Toolbar for Firefox nicknamed "Sparky." The nickname comes from the traffic data "sparkline" that the toolbar places in the Firefox status bar. There is no vertical scale given for the sparklines, they exist mainly to give you a quick visual of how the site's Alexa traffic rank has changed over the past few months. Next to the sparkline is the current Alexa traffic rank, along with a bar to give a visual of the site's popularity. You also have access to Alexa's list of related sites, although these available through the "Related Links" drop down menu at the top of the browser.

So, this is all great stuff if you want to know how popular a site is or are constantly looking for new sites to visit, but what if that's not you? Well, there's yet another reason to install the Alexa toolbar. It's no secret that Alexa ranks websites, and one of the ways we know which sites are popular and which are not is by looking and highly anonymized toolbar usage. Yep, that's right, when you surf the web with your Alexa toolbar you are casting votes for which sites you like. It's just like being a Nielsen Family, although instead of TV ratings you are helping rank websites. You are also contributing to the related links you see in your toolbar and on alexa.com, and helping other users of the site you are visiting find things they may be interested in as well. It's simple, too. The more times you visit a site and the more pages you view while there, the more important you are saying the site is. Pretty cool, huh? There's no need to be a super influential blogger, have a million followers on twitter, or spend hours digging things to be heard. All you need to do is surf the web and Alexa does the rest.

So what about spyware? As an engineer here at Alexa, I occasionally get asked if Alexa is spyware or not. Does the Alexa toolbar collect your votes about which websites are the best on the Internet? Yes, but only if you "opt in" and install it. And we try to be very up front about the fact that you are sending us anonymous information to help us measure the popularity of websites. The Alexa toolbar contains no advertising, and does not profile or target you in any way. So when I surf with an Alexa toolbar installed, I get information about sites I'm on as well as suggestions for other sites to visit, and I'm voting for the sites I visit the most, that's it. It's pretty sweet if you ask me.

More New Alexa Features: Demographics, Clickstream, Search Traffic

2009-04-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

We are excited to announce three new features being released on Alexa today: Demographics, Clickstream and Search Traffic.

Demographics - provides a demographic breakdown for virtually any site, including gender, age, education and more
Clickstream - shows the sites visitors were on before and after any site
Search Traffic - shows how much traffic a site gets from search engines

Let's take a look at each of these features a little more closely. First, let's take the demographics for Oprah.com:

We have heard from media planners and ad-buyers that demographic data can be useful when planning a campaign to make sure your ad campaign hits your target audience. It can also be useful when looking at your competitors to help you decide if you have an opportunity to grow your audience by expanding into a new demographic. Looking at the demographic data to the left, you'll notice that Oprah.com skews toward Females, Ages 45-54, with a college education, browsing from home . That sounds about right. You can get this type of information for just about any site on the Web, even sites where the demographics might not be so obvious, like yelp.com for example.

Next up, let's take a look at the clickstream for careerbuilder.com:

The Clickstream feature contains two separate sections, Upstream Sites, which shows where visitors were before coming to careerbuilder.com, and Downstream Sites, which shows where visitors went after leaving CareerBuilder. The list of upstream sites can be a great way to identify affiliate relationships or significant advertising placements. You can see here that CareerBuilder has an unusually large percent of traffic coming from MSN. With a little digging you'll find that this is due to a partnership between MSN and CareerBuilder.

Downstream sites shows where visitors went after leaving CareerBuilder. This type of information can be very valuable to product managers identify why people are leaving their site. In CareerBuilder's case, you'll see that people are going to cbsalary.com, presumably to look at salaries in their region, and going to Facebook. In this case, CareerBuilder may want to build in a salary lookup feature and some social networking features if they want to keep these people from leaving.

Last but not least, we have a new feature called Search Traffic, which shows how much traffic a site historically gets from search engines. Let's take a look at how Yelp.com compares with Yellowpages.com.

Search Traffic, is in essence, a measure of how well a site is optimized for search engines. Case in point, you can see here on the graph to the left that Yelp.com (in blue) is well optimized and gets approximately 50% of their traffic from search engines. Comparing Yelp to Yellow Pages.com (in red) you will see that Yellowpages.com has an opportunity to grow their visits significantly if they can improve their search traffic to match Yelp.

I hope that you find these new features helpful as you continue to grow your web businesses. If you have a success story that you would like us to share, or if you have discovered a novel use for one of our features, let me know. We continuing to build out Alexa in response to the comments and feedback that we receive, so don't be shy. The best way to get in touch with us is commenting in the blog, or shooting us a quick e-mail via this link.

CBS Sports vs. Fox Sports

2009-04-10T17:12:00.001-07:00

CBS recently announced their terrific traffic figures for the March Madness NCAA College Basketball tournament, here. The numbers were impressive:

5.6 million views in the first four days of coverage
60% YOY growth

You can see the Alexa Daily reach for CBS Sports shown in blue on the left.

What CBS neglects to mention is that they are the perennial second in online sports, and that their brief success was followed by a quick return to the status quo.

If you look at the Fox Sports trend line in red you'll see that they enjoy peaks on a regular basis that meet or exceed the brief spike in CBS Sports traffic, and the traffic to foxsports.com is consistently more than double cbssports.com.

What were those two spikes in Fox Sports traffic (in red) on Feb 1 and March 1. Soccer. Who knew?

Kudos to CBS. Those traffic figures are very impressive. Keep it up and you may catch Fox.

Releasing A New Feature Today - Search Terms

2009-04-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

Last week was an exciting week for us. We released a new look for Alexa.com with some new features and new datapoints. We received mountains of great feedback which we are using to make ongoing improvements.

One of messages we heard loud and clear about last week's release was that people love, LOVE, all of the nitty gritty stats about websites and want more of it. Beware what you wish for...

Today we are releasing another datapoint: Search Terms

The Search Terms feature allows you to see the search terms that have been driving traffic to a site over the last month. To break it down for those of you who aren't in the biz, it works like this. People type search terms into search engines. Then people click on sites listed in the results. With a little sifting and sorting, we take that information and rearrange it, so you can see what search terms result in traffic to individual sites.

This feature is particularly useful if you are planning to buy search terms, or if you are trying to optimize your site for search engines. Now, you can see a list of terms for virtually any site, in sorted order, that are driving traffic. Rather than hunting, pecking and guessing, trying, failing, trying again... you can see what terms actually work for your competitors.

To see this new data, just go to an Alexa Site Info page for any site, for example, wired.com (Site Info), and click on the "Keywords" tab.

Let's take a couple of examples. First up, Crutchfield.com (Site Info), a popular online electronics retailer. What are their terms?

The first for almost all sites is, not surprisingly, the site name, often followed by the domain, in this crutchfield.com.

As you can see from this list, Crutchfield is getting a lot of traffic from a set of very target search terms and phrases. If you were bestbuy.com, for example, this list would be of particular interest to you. You can see that the three leading non-brand name search terms were all car-related terms and were driving a significant amount of traffic to Crutchfield. By looking at the Search Term data for Crutchfield and for other competing sites bestbuy.com could decide which terms were driving the most traffic and which ones presented the greatest opportunity.

Let's take one more example. Let's say you have a blog about government waste and you are trying to decide what search terms to buy and how to best optimize your site. Where do you begin? Start by looking at leaders in the field. In this case, Citizens Against Government Waste, cagw.org (Site Info):

This list, as most, will contain the name of the site in the number one position and the domain, in this case CAGW, as well. No surprise there. After you get that out of the way you can see where CAGW's bread and butter is: pork products. Pork Barrel Spending, Pork Barrel, Pork Spending, Pig Book. If you have a site about government waste you would be well advised to take note of these terms.

Alexa's newest feature, Search Terms, is not just for the big and highly sophisticated brand name sites. No matter who you are, if you have any online presence at all, from the large retailer, to the small blog, you need to start thinking about how to get more traffic to your site. This feature is your key. It is where you should begin and you start planning the content on your site and your keyword buying strategy.

I hope that you find the new data useful and I encourage you to let us know your thoughts. I would also like to hear some success stories. Were you able to increase your traffic? Make more money? Retire at the age of 25? Let us know! You can leave a comment in this blog, get a hold of us on Twitter, or send us an e-mail.

We will continue to focus our efforts on building the features and services that are most useful to you.

P.S. Lots more is in store. As I mentioned last week, the whole reason for the Alexa redesign was to allow us to build and release new features quickly, and that is just what we intend to do. So stay tuned and expect more to come...

Conficker Worm Scaremongering... Who Benefited?

2009-04-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been living in a shack in Montana, without electricity, cable television and the warm glow of the Internet to keep you warm, then you have been exposed to scaremongering about the so called April Fools Day virus/worm, "conficker", which was scheduled to wreak havoc and "unthinkable disaster"on April 1. April 1 came and went with barely a whimper. Unless you were selling anti-virus software, in which case you were busy ringing the cash register.

Not since Y2K have so many news outlets invested so much effort to scare the public for little or no reason at all. Even 60 minutes got involved with a scary story hyping the perceived threat.

Take a look at this Google Trends graph for the word "conficker" you'll see that the media really started pushing the story in late March... it indicates the number of news stories mentioning the word "conficker". Clearly, the media started pushing this story hard, despite the obvious evidence indicating that conficker was going to be a dud.

As fun as it would be to theorize why the media go crazy like this, scare the populace, and push stories that benefit no one except for the media, in form of increased ratings, and in this case, the anti-virus companies in the form of increased sales, I will resist. Instead I will just show you a few graphs and let you decide.

Let's take a look at some categories of websites in the run up to April 1st. First up...

Anti-Virus Software Providers:
It looks like panic and frenzy, frothed up by the media over inflated claims of a horribly destructive Internet worm are good for business. Bully for the anti-virus companies. This panic is a cash cow. A golden goose. But it is not all profit. These companies spent a lot of money in the last several months buying keywords on the search engines like "worm", "virus" and "conficker", and pushing out research reports about the grave danger. Hey, you gotta spend money to make money.

Next up...

The Technology Press:

It is not clear that the Technology press benefited from the scare. Viewed on a shorter timescale, these sites all appeared to have a bit of a jump as April 1 approached. But taking a step back and looking at them over a longer period the apparent jump in traffic is well within normal bounds. As for the bump in the CNET graph, I'm not sure of the cause, but since it happened in early March I'll assume it wasn't conficker related.

Next up...

Mainstream Press:
I am not seeing any indication that the mainstream press increased their traffic in the run up to April 1. The traffic graphs all indicate that these sites were experiencing traffic well within normal bounds. If you were hoping to blame the press for pushing this story to increase ratings you will have to conclude that either a) you were wrong, or b) the press didn't do a very good job. Evil geniuses? Maybe you are half right.

Of the three categories, anti-virus companies, technology Press and mainstream press, who was the big winner? The anti-virus companies. So go out and buy some stock. They just got a nice little boost to the bottom line...

Or, you had better hold that thought. You already missed the boat. Both Symantec and McAfee are both up 20% this month. Another lesson learned.

Today's lessons: A) News travels quickly, and B) Panic can be good for business.

A new way to find websites

2009-04-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hello, I'm Wayne, and I'm an engineer here at Alexa. I know I’m biased, but I’m having a lot of fun with Alexa’s new site finder and I thought I would share. The site finder is different type of search engine, one that is designed to find websites about things instead of web pages that contain things. Here, let me explain. When I am looking for something online, I usually go to my favorite search engine, type in a few words, and hit search. What I get is a list of pages that contain those words ranked by some sort of measure of relevance and importance, which often is exactly what I want. Examples of this include searching for help with a coding problem, looking for song lyrics, and finding documentation. Sometimes, however, I’m more interested in finding an entire website devoted to a topic. There is a big difference between sites that have pages that contain the word “woodworking” and sites about woodworking, and with the standard keyword searches we’re used to it can be difficult to find the latter (a website about a topic) in the sea of the former (pages that mention the topic).

My father is retired and carpentry is his hobby. He’s also not that tech savvy, and “woodworking” is a real world example of a search that baffled him in the past. If you type “woodworking” into Google you get a plethora of results, from books to videos to blogs to magazines to local interest to search suggestions to websites. Most of the results are excellent, of course, but there is a lot there, and the fact that “woodworking” and “wood working” are bold everywhere adds to the overload. Ultimately what my father wanted, though, was a list of web pages about his hobby, and nothing more.

In comes the Alexa Site Finder. I can enter “woodworking” into the Find sites about box, press go, and I have a list of websites about woodworking. It’s a pretty good list, too, similar to what I found with Google but a lot more focused. Alexa also returns the traffic rank for the site, which is an estimate of the sites popularity. The lower the rank, the more people visit and use the site (Google is rank 1), which may or may not make it more interesting to me. For woodworking I’m not too worried about rank, and the majority of Internet users are not woodworkers. But it’s certainly a good indicator of what’s a site that people find useful versus a site that was abandoned a long time ago.

For woodworking traffic rank wasn’t that important, but there are other times when it is invaluable. I do a lot of volunteer work for a local animal rescue, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve visibility. I recently turned to the site finder for help, and discovered a handful of high traffic sites that list non-profits. Now I know which organizations we need to be listed with to get the greatest exposure, which will help us help more animals.

The Site Finder also allows me to filter my results by language, user country, category, adult content, and traffic. For example, I can filter my search results to include sites with predominantly US users and without adult content, and then include only sites with a rank <100,000>100,00 to search for undiscovered gems. Cool stuff!

Pardon Our Dust...

2009-03-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

A Quick Tour of the Alexa Redesign

Thank you for taking an interest in the recent Alexa redesign. We have moved quite a few things around in an effort to improve the site for you. If you have any comments or suggestions, please tell us.

Why did you change the site?

When we took a good look at the Alexa feature roadmap we realized that we needed to change. We needed to be more flexible and we needed to embrace some new technologies. So we decided to start from scratch, built a new version of the site with new technology, and along the way we took a fresh look at just about everything.

How did you decide on this design?

We are fortunate to have access to a very large group of consultants with years of experience… you!

Really. We listened to the feedback of our customers and found some common themes. Some features were hard to find. Some were not well integrated. And some others were just confusing. So we made some changes, and then we made some more until we arrived at the version you see here today.

What has changed?

It isn’t just a new look for Alexa. We have focused on several areas that customers have repeatedly told us are most important to them, including finding sites, navigating between features, and the core Alexa feature: data about websites.

Finding Sites. We ditched the search engine in favor of a site finder. Now when you type in a search term you get a list of sites that have content on that topic. This way it is easier to find the site you are looking for and go immediately to the Alexa site info, rankings and other information that you are looking for. Give it a try: Search for barbecue.

Navigating Between Features. We have reworked the tabs at the top of the site and the navigation throughout to be more consistent. Clicking on the title of a website will take you to a site info page. Clicking on a website address will take you directly to that address. And more… Alexa features should be easier to find and easier to use.

More Data About Websites. We have added three new types of traffic history graph: Pageviews per User, Bounce Rate, and Time on Site. These particular pieces of data have been repeatedly requested by marketers and investors who need to know more about the quality of traffic to sites… are the visitors to the site engaged? Is the site improving?

But I liked Alexa the way it was!

Virtually all of the data that you have come to expect from Alexa is still here. Traffic Rank, Reach, Pageviews, Sites Linking In and more… they are all here. If you have difficulty finding anything let us know.

We hope that you will come to love the new Alexa as much as we do. Surf around a little and take ‘er for a test drive. If you have some comments please share them with us. We would love to know what you think. We will read all of your comments and keep them in mind as we continue to work to improve the site. Thank you – we couldn’t do this without you.

The Economy, Cars, and Website Traffic

2009-03-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that the automobile sector has been hit hard during the economic downturn. Visions of GM, Ford and Chrysler CEOs sitting in front on the Congress of the United States, hat in hand, begging to be saved and apologizing for that whole “vision” thing will stick with us for some time. But it is not just the US automakers that have been hurt. Japanese automakers have been hit hard as well, posting terrible earnings and dire warnings about future sales. But who has been hit hardest?

Web traffic isn’t a perfect predictor of earnings, but in this case, we’ll have to make an exception. First, let’s take a look at two US automakers, Ford, and Chrysler.

Going back 20 months, shortly before the economic downturn, you can see that both Ford and Chrysler websites have seen a decline in Reach and that they are now getting only 50% as much traffic as they did two years ago. Ford announced that February sales were down 48.4% year over year... hmmm, saw that one coming. Similarly, Chrysler reported a 50% decline in sales in January, year over year.

Of course it isn’t all that simple. Ford owns many brands across the world, including Lincoln, Mercury, Volvo, (Ford sold the Jaguar and Rover brands), and has an interest in many others, and the traffic to the ford.com website can’t begin to speak for all of them. But then again, maybe it can. Ford.com gets vastly more traffic than its other brands. Take a look:

If you were to add the traffic to all the Ford brands together it would not change the trend, and you would see that it is, at least in this case, a terrific predictor for future earnings.

But what of the Japanese automakers? The news stories say they’ve been hit pretty hard as well. How did their websites fare?

Ouch. Honda was hit particularly hard between mid summer and Christmas, losing over 60% of their reach. But the good news is that Honda appears to be bouncing back, no doubt due to their hybrid lineup. Unfortunately for Nissan, traffic remains the pits.

Is it all bad news? Like any good hurricane, many of the old trees fall, making way for younger trees. This recession is no different and we are going to see some smaller companies taking advantage of the older, slower, lumbering giants to provide cars that we want now. Who might they be? Will it be Tesla Motors, who decided to produce a ridiculously overpriced electric super car, that in hindsight looks like something that only an overpaid AIG exec (is there any other kind?) might drive?:

They appear to have been hit pretty hard too. Somehow spending $100,000 on a wildly impractical car seems irresponsible right now. Imagine that. But Tesla's fate may change again soon. Just today we got a sneak peak at a much more reasonably priced Tesla electric car, the Tesla Model S. Check out the graph in a few days and you will see a big jump up.

Tata Motors is another company that looks poised to make a big jump. Never heard of them, well you will soon. They are and Indian company and they have been talking about their ambitious plan to make the world’s most affordable car, the ridiculously small and appropriately named Nano, and just this morning they finally pulled off the (very small) covers. Traffic to their tata.com saw a corresponding spike:

Oh, and did I forget to mention, Tata owns Jaguar and Rover?

To end on an up-note, I’d like to show this graph, which to me illustrates how this economy is going to affect the quick and agile. Here we have scion.com, a division of Toyota, and makers of smaller, inexpensive cars, with loads of style, geared primarily to a younger audience:

You can see that December looked like the world was coming to an end for scion.com. Traffic to scion.com had dropped by over 80% from its Summer high, to near zero, but has now bounced back. As far as scion.com is concerned, this recession is over. Unfortunately, Ford and Chrysler can’t say the same thing, and this recession is going to last a bit longer. Or, worse yet, maybe this economic hurricane has toppled them for good.

Does Facebook Really Have Twitter Envy?

2009-03-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

If you use Facebook then you have heard all the grumbling over the new Facebook layout. It seems that over 90% of users hate it, and there are rumors that Mark Zuckerberg thinks that user feedback is irrelevant. So why the change?

Facebook's new layout looks somehow familiar to Twitter users. It is now arranged to look more like a news feed. The common consensus? Facebook is trying to copy Twitter.

But how ridiculous is that? Sure, if you didn't know any better you might think that Twitter was a serious competitor to Facebook. Twitter certainly has been in the news a lot lately. It seems that every news story surrounding President Obama's speech to the joint session of Congress mentioned how our representatives were using Twitter.

But that, too, is ridiculous. If this is the source for Facebook's wildly unpopular redesign, they need to stop and take a look at some numbers before making 90% of their users unhappy. Facebook, take note:

Yes, Twitter is growing, and it is growing rapidly. Over the last three months, Twitter has grown their user base significantly, more than doubling the number of daily visitors. But look closer. Twitter is still just a blip on the horizon compared to Facebook, and a tiny one at that. It still only has 2% as many Daily Visitors as Facebook.

But don't stop there. In terms of growth, Facebook has continued to grow at an incredible rate. In whole numbers, over the period where Twitter doubled its user base, Facebook wasn't sitting still. It grew its daily visitors 32%. That's quite a feat for a site that already has 50X as many daily visitors as Twitter. It means that Facebook's increase in total daily visitors was 20X more than Twitter.

My advice to Facebook: Twitter isn't serious competition yet. Just look at the numbers.

Hard-Hitting Viral Satire

2009-03-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

After the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama in January, the Huffington Post had a short piece about how Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart would handle the transition. The general sense was that a show that capitalized on eight years of the administration of George W. Bush might have to work a little harder to find material with a significantly more articulate president. Would having a Democrat in office make it harder for them to produce their fairly liberal satire?

To answer that question, along came Jim Cramer from CNBC's show Mad Money. In case you haven't heard, there was a back-and-forth between Stewart and the financial network; Stewart highlighted how the network had seemed very optimistic in the months preceding the current series of financial storms, citing Cramer's bullishness on Bear Stearns as an example. Stewart's outrage was real, and the satire was fierce. About three episodes of The Daily Show ended up escalating the critique, culminating in Cramer himself appearing on the show and being essentially eviscerated by Stewart. The result was a massive jump in traffic to the show's website, presumably by those seeking the relevant clips.

So, while the current state of the economy is making none of us too happy, it's been a gift to The Daily Show as they transition from nonstop Bush-bashing to the present situation. The flap with Cramer brought more eyeballs to thedailyshow.com than any time in the past six months, including election day and the inauguration.

Did you catch the show? Did you watch the clips online? Weigh in in the comments and give us your take.

Twitterpated!

2009-03-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

When I first heard about Twitter last year, I was confused. "Why on earth," I thought, "Would I want to announce what I'm doing or thinking to the world?" I asked around and it seemed most folks were in my camp. I couldn't find friends to "Follow" any more than I could imagine what in the world would be worthy of a "Tweet".

As time passed, I decided I had to try it out for professional reasons--you can't work in the internet industry and ignore new developments in the space. I opened an account and followed the short list of people I could find who were also on Twitter. And I waited for a while, dutifully tweeting about being hungry or tired or whatever, and feeling like I must have hit that point in your life where you just can't get into what the kids are doing these days.

Finally, I found my Twitter-muse. I started tweeting in haiku! One of the greatest hurdles initially was that I can't answer a yes-or-no question in fewer than 140 characters. But seventeen syllables usually come in under the limit. I now exchange tweets with people I've never met in person or even e-mailed. I follow breaking local news and pundits. I was hooked. But I still found few people outside of work who knew about the coolness.

Needless to say, that day has passed. Twitter has steadily grown in popularity as more people have learned of its existence. At this point, if you haven't at least heard of Twitter, if not tweeted yourself--well, you're certainly not getting wi-fi in your cave. Politicians tweet now. I hear about it in the mainstream many times a day.

Twitter is one of the more recent in a series of phenomena starting with the internet, passing through personal homepages, then blogs, then social networking websites. And judging from the steady climb in the graph, Twitter is not going anywhere soon. Gone are the days when the few of us who knew about it were constantly annoyed by the appearance of what was dubbed the "Fail Whale" when logging into the site. This is all the more impressive when you consider that the graph only shows web traffic. People tweet from their mobile phones. There's a whole wave of software like Yoono that lets you participate in the tweet frenzy without even leaving whatever web page you're already on. Can you say, "Critical Mass?"

Do you have a Twitter account? How long have you been tweeting? Whom do you follow? Let us know in the comments.

All Eyes On Obama

2009-02-25T17:30:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, there was an ad campaign for financial services of some sort that do not interest a child, but I remember it to this day. The tagline was "When E. F. Hutton Talks, People Listen." I think there might be a new E. F. Hutton for this century. If I had a website, I'd really be wishing President Obama would mention it.

In addition to leading the country, that man drives traffic to a site like gangbusters. As I saw a headline about Obama creating a new internet sensation, I thought, "Again? Wow. He's good." The article turned out to be about recent, frequent traffic to Recovery.gov, the president's new website with a searchable database of how and where tax dollars are spent as a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It's true: lots of traffic in a short period of time. People really do, apparently, want to know how this is all going to work.

I began to wonder how this "internet sensation" compares to the others in recent months around President Obama. Well, after his election in November, a whole lot more people scurried to the web to see what was in store for America and the world. The newly minted Change.gov website shot up like a rocket, practically overnight. Was that the biggest splash Obama made in the pool of web traffic? Nope:

When the historic event of America's first ever bi-racial president's inauguration happened, way more people went to Whitehouse.gov to commemorate the event. The man's residence sets mice a-clicking. And it's really no wonder. Barack Obama used the web, from YouTube to grassroots organizing, to un-precedented advantage. The internet is now home to the twenty-first century version of Fireside Chats. He knows it's a powerful medium, and he's taking full advantage. So, was inauguration day's traffic to the First Website the most impressive surge? No again. Election day and his mere name hold that honor:

Facebook Friending the World

2009-02-18T17:19:00.000-08:00

I read an article this morning called "How Facebook is Taking Over Our Lives." It's packed with amazing factoids about the "social utility" brainchild of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. One such nugget is that if it were a country, it would have a population roughly approximating that of Brazil. And it's growing like some of those microorganisms I learned about in biology that split every few seconds--signing up new users, sometimes as many as five million per week.

This doesn't surprise me in the least, having recently become a fan myself. I got an account years ago when you had to have a university address to see it. I thought, "Meh, just another one of those things where I can broadcast to the world how little I'm up to." Years passed. It overtook MySpace in traffic months ago, as we reported on this blog in May.

After a while, I started hearing people in my circles, outside of work, talking about it. I'm, to put it gingerly, certainly in the post-college demographic. (When I started working at Alexa nine years ago, I thought of someone my current age as old.) Then, a few months back, my best friend sent me a friend request--she's way less inclined to jump on a bandwagon than I, so I caved. Dozens of friend invitations later, I'm reunited with high school friends. Full circle: last week I got friended by a favorite relative in my mom's age group, and this morning I had another friend recommend the article on which I'm now blogging!

The site is certainly sticky. I have a few ways to get and post updates without actually going to the website because I don't dare venture there regularly and try to hold a job. And I've noticed an increase recently in the number of times I accept a friend request from the guy who took my lunch money every day in the sixth grade only to see, "Joe is new to Facebook. Recommend people Joe may know."

And the traffic data certainly supports the trends I've observed, and those reported in the article. While this graph only represents the traffic to the Facebook website itself, not all those widgets we use to get our fix without getting swept away, their Reach has practically tripled in a year. I'm curious to watch how this plays out.

Are you on Facebook? Is your mom? What's your favorite way to read and share updates? Which are your favorite features?

If you're not, did you try it and not like it, or are you resisting for other reasons? Please tell us in the comments.

Award Shows: Eyeballs Online and Onscreen

2009-02-11T16:51:00.001-08:00

This year, the Grammy Awards drew a near-record viewing audience; three million more viewers than last year's show tuned in. That's roughly twenty million viewers. I know this because I read a delightfully snarky article about the show in the Washington Post.

Did the web reflect a greater interest this year than last, mirroring the television data? Not really. A graph of the traffic to the Grammy website seems to indicate no real boost.

Once I started looking at the Grammy data, it occurred to me that I'm generally more interested in the Oscars than the Grammy awards. I don't know why--I mean, I listen to far more music than I watch movies. For some reason, though, I'm more interested in the Oscars. Maybe I'm an oddball--my background in theatre and lack of musical talent might skew me. What does web traffic say about the relative popularity of the two galas?

According to the column I read in the Washington Post, the Oscars had 32 million viewers last year, while the Grammys had 17 million. This year the Grammys had three million more viewers than last year. Oddly, the traffic data for both websites year over year seems to accurately reflect the television data with regard to their relative popularity. So I guess I'm like everyone else after all--we like movie awards more than music awards.

Is that true of you? Which do you prefer? Between this year and last, which Grammycast was more important to you?

Google Passes Yahoo!

2009-01-30T13:58:00.000-08:00

Based on long-term trends it was inevitable... Google.com was going to pass Yahoo.com to become the number one site on the Web. It was just a matter of time. Now it is official:

Google is the #1 Alexa Ranked site on the web.

Google will need to keep it up if it is going to surpass Yahoo in the 3 month average rankings, which is the official ranking number shown in our lists.

Here's how it went down:

October 2007 - Unique Visitors to Google surpasses Yahoo. Yahoo still has the larger number of pageviews by a healthy but shrinking margin.
January 5, 2009 - Alexa Daily Rank for Google is #1 for the first time.

For the last few weeks Yahoo snuck (sneaked?) back into the #1 position on Saturdays (the 10th and 17th) only to lose it again on Mondays (the 12th and 19th.) This appears to be caused by the drop in unique visitors to Google on weekends. Google has remained the number #1 site since January 19th.

It kind of makes you want to root for the new underdog, Yahoo!. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

National Day of Service

2009-01-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

With the recent celebration of Martin Luther King Day, designated by congress in 1994 to be a national day of service in honor of the late American hero, many Americans took advantage of the national holiday in order to volunteer in their communities. President Barack Obama, in the enthusiastic weeks leading to his election, emphasized to all Americans the importance of service.

It has since been reported that hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country turned out to share the spirit of volunteerism. I decided to look at the traffic to various sites related to this endeavor to observe how the web reflects this. I first looked at USA Service, the website created by then President-elect Obama to promote this cause. This website is particularly useful in that it outlines the event and provides resources for those inspired to get on board. I also consulted a similar social-entrepreneurship website with which I'm familiar, Change.org. Not surprisingly, USA Service was immediately popular and continues to document the success of the national event. Similarly, Change.org saw a nice increase in traffic in the weeks leading up to the big event.

I also noted increased traffic to other volunteer-oriented websites such as Volunteer Match and Idealist.org. Not surprisingly, these sites showed and increase in traffic alongside visits to the official site for MLK Day. Such sites took advantage of the publicity, with Volunteer Match launching a Google Earth widget to identify volunteer opportunities in a specific area, and Idealist.org announcing the largest turnout ever for Martin Luther King Day of Service.

Did you participate in a service project on MLK Day? Does the spirit that lingers inspire you to do so in the future, and if so, which online resources do you find helpful?

Haiku Winner

2009-01-09T16:33:00.000-08:00

Thank you to everybody who participated in the Alexa Haiku contest. There were a lot of great entries and I had a tough time choosing. I have to admit that I may not be the best judge of quality haikus. Never the less, the winner is Ken Evoy whose Site Built It Haiku seemed to hit all the right notes. Here it is:

I fail round the clock
Winter, spring, summer and fall
Until Site Build It!.

Ken, I don't think I have your contact info. Get in touch with me via our advertising contact form to get your Ad set up. You have a million free impressions on Alexa.

I'd also like to extend Kudos to Jon of woodmarvels.com for submitting two great haikus.

Happy New Year everybody.

New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-09T11:11:00.001-08:00

What's your new year's resolution? Will you quit smoking? Exercise? Go on a diet?

While I was home for the holidays, I saw a lot of commercials for fitness clubs and diets. Lots of them. And it occurred to me that the close of the year is likely a big time for companies in the business of getting people fit to advertise. There you are, having packed on the holiday pounds, watching television and worried about your personal finances, then along comes a commercial that tempts you to make a change in honor of the new year.

I decided to compare traffic, year over year, to sites having to do with fitness centers or dieting plans. I just picked a few of the better known ones at random to examine their traffic now versus a year ago. Based on what I found, it seems some people might have read this study concluding that diet is a better way to stay trim than exercise.

While the traffic between the two years seems fairly level to sites dealing with health clubs like Bally's, 24 Hour Fitness, and Crunch, there's a good bit more traffic going to the dieting sites like Nutrisystem and Weight Watchers.

Is a health club membership too costly in terms of time or money to be as popular among Americans looking to trim down this year? Does dieting seem the best way to make a positive change to one's health? Or is it the commercials? Feel free to weigh in with a comment.

Alexa Haiku

2008-12-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

I participated in a keynote panel at AddonCon yesterday, which incidentally was a terrific conference. There are a lot of people doing interesting work out there. Some examples, all from the keynote panel: Foxmarks (synchronize your bookmarks and get recommendations), Glue, by Adaptive Blue (social surfing... see who else visited this page and what they thought), One Riot (social search engine and hot urls features.) Not to leave anybody out, we also had Conduit and CoolIris on the panel as well (both fine products.)

Each of the panelists were asked by our moderator, Jeremy Liew, to write a haiku explaining their business. I wish I had written them all down because they were entertaining. Alec Jeong, of CoolIris, had arguably the best haiku. But he had some help from his wife, who is Japanese. I don't think any of us had any previous experience writing haikus, and we were all pushed out of our comfort zone. Some of the haikus were literal. Some were funny. Some were thought-provoking.

Here is what I came up with for Alexa. (It is best to say these slowly and thoughtfully...)

This site is obscure
Can I get some more info?
I'll try Alexa

Anybody else care to give it a try? Write a haiku about your business or about Alexa. Here are the rules. The first line is 5 syllables, the second is 7, and the third is 5. For examples and other subtleties regarding haikus check out the Wikipedia entry for Haiku.

Post yours in the comments. Our comments are moderated, so make it good. I'll pick the winner and kick in a million free 125X125 ad impressions on Alexa (a $3,000 value.)

Black Friday This Year and Last

2008-12-02T17:09:00.000-08:00

Since we've been having all this trouble with the economy, and with all the companies announcing layoffs and the like, in addition to crossing my fingers, I have been curious about how all of this would impact the holidays. One thing I like about Alexa's historical traffic data is that I can compare this year's traffic to last year's traffic to certain sites.

One type of site that really applies here are those leaking Black Friday ads. Because Black Friday is traditionally seen as the beginning of the holiday shopping season, these sites can show some interesting comparisons year over year. The most popular of which I am aware are blackfriday.info and bfads.net, and shoplocal.com.

The traffic to all three of these sites was greater last year than this year. Does this mean that fewer people were searching for bargains this holiday season? Not likely, given the stories of extreme shopping such as the unfortunate trampling death of a worker at a chain store that morning. What seems more likely is that there are fewer who are able to shop at all. Whatever the reason, it might be wise to brace yourselves for hand-made sweaters and scarves from your relatives this holiday season.

California Same-Sex Marriage Campaigns on the Web

2008-11-24T17:57:00.001-08:00

In addition to the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency this month, one of the most newsworthy battles was that of Californians to overturn a previous ruling by the California Supreme Court that same-sex marriage was legal. Opponents of same-sex marriage put a proposition on the state ballot to reverse that decision by amending the state constitution to say, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." [That link is a PDF.]

As a San Francisco resident, I was keenly aware of the intense feelings on both sides of the debate over Proposition 8. Because I'm in San Francisco, most of what I heard was from the No on 8 side. This, to be clear, is yes to same-sex marriages, but no to the amendment to the constitution--confused yet? I happen to know gay people who were in support of same-sex marriage, but voted yes on the proposition by mistake--they're kinda feeling a bit queasy for not reading the ballot a bit more carefully.

What I find interesting is that it was a surprise to many of us that the proposition passed. Then, though, in discussions over time, it became clear that the No on 8 people did not do enough to educate the general population. Not only did they manage to leave some not voting the way they thought they were, but the campaign did not do nearly enough outreach. Perhaps it's because the proponents of same-sex marriage simply couldn't believe it was necessary to work harder. And they were outspent for a good while. The Yes on 8 people hit the ground running and did not let up. And they prevailed.

I think a fairly clear illustration of this point can be seen by comparing the traffic to the two central websites on the issue, noonprop8.com and protectmarriage.com. The victorious proponents of the proposition had so many more eyeballs. I don't even watch television, but they had banner ads all over the web. I suppose it's just proof that if you work hard and push your message, you'll get some traffic to your website. For some Californians, it's a painful reminder that you have aggressively pursue what you want.

What's Hot on the Web Right Now?

2008-11-10T15:38:00.000-08:00

Alexa keeps rolling out exciting new features. We recently made new features available on our Top Sites Lists, and those are being well-received by web professionals. While I work for Alexa Internet and am interested in that sort of data, I tend to like shiny things. So, for those of you who, like me, are interested in the new new thing, I would like to point out our newest homepage offering, which I like to call Hot URLs.

One of the most rewarding things about using and working for Alexa is the way the Toolbar is a two-way street. Each member of the community, in addition to getting a useful tool, is giving back. Now, we're all pitching in to identify specific pages that are blazing to the top of the charts. Every five minutes, we determine the most popular pages visited by our Toolbar users during the last hour, and update a list of What's Hot on the Web Right Now.

So, on a busy morning at the office, I could take a quick break to look at the Alexa homepage and learn that Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had a heated exchange over Veteran's Day on The View. (You'll be relieved to know Whoopi intervened and moved the show along.)

One thing I've learned as we've been preparing the What's Hot on the Web feature to go live is that there's something for everyone. And seeing what's going viral as it happens, therefore scooping your friends, is highly addictive.

Let us know what you think of the new feature in the comments. And, of course, if you think we're missing the really hot stuff, be sure to download the Alexa Toolbar and start feeding us your tips.

New Top Sites Lists Have Exclusive Data Points

2008-10-22T14:41:00.000-07:00

Update: This post refers to Top Sites lists we are no longer selling. You can now download a CSV file of the top million sites ranked by Alexa for free.

If you use Alexa's traffic data to make business decisions, you're going to love this.

Now, for the first time, we are making data available in our downloadable Top Sites Lists that does not appear anywhere on Alexa.com. In response to your requests, our Top Sites Lists include Unique Monthly User estimates and Monthly Pageview estimates. How do you compare with your competitors? Which acquisition proposition will bring the most eyeballs your way? With our new lists, the answer is one CSV file away.

While Alexa's website provides Traffic Rank data for all sites on the web, many of our customers asked for estimates of unique users and pageviews. Well, here you are. We still have the Global Top 500 and Top 100 by Language or Country accessible for free on our site. But if you want some solid estimates of visitors and pageviews, you can buy global lists of up to the Top 100,000 sites with data available only in those lists, and nowhere else on Alexa.com.

And we didn't even raise the price.

So, whether you're scoping out ad buys or looking for prospective clients; whether you are considering acquisitions or weighing partnerships, you can now base your digital decisions on additional data points with our new, improved Top Sites Lists.

Election Year Scandals for Traffic

2008-10-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

I have recently been interested in the way smaller sites with which I was not previously familiar hit my radar as I observe traffic surging to them for one particular article relating to some scandal or other in the presidential election. Whether it's a confession, a funny image, or a fake interview, one well placed election-related item can put a site on the map.

Such was the case, for example, when Christopher Buckley, the son of the late uber-conservative William F. Buckley, posted a column on The Daily Beast announcing his intention to vote for Barack Obama, the Democrat. As he explained, he chose The Daily Beast because he thought it would be safer than his regular gig at the National Review Online--he was certain he'd receive tons of hate mail if he posted it there. Well, it did result in the National Review dropping his column. But it also resulted in many people visiting, for the first time, The Daily Beast. Scoop!

Another recent site that came to my attention while I was chasing traffic spikes was Street Prophets, a relatively small blog (and part of the Daily Kos community) on politics and faith. What appeared to drive the increase in traffic to the site was an image that alleged of Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, "Finally, a beauty queen who doesn't want world peace."

Similarly, I had not personally been aware of the news blog African Press International, which saw a jump in traffic after publishing an allegedly fake interview with Michelle Obama.

I suppose my all-time favorite spike in traffic related to an election-year scoop of sorts was that in early August to the website Funny or Die. While the site frequently has a viral hit, the surge to a scripted announcement by Paris Hilton of her own political aspirations in response to John McCain's ad about Barack Obama's celebrity. Putting that one on the graph makes the others seem like mere blips.

About That Bailout

2008-10-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks, all the talk of the Wall Street bailou--ahem: Rescue Plan--had me wondering where people might be going on the web in order to follow the issue. While there would potentially be a flurry of activity to various banks for statements about the crisis, I was curious about any sort of sites that might have been pro- or anti-bailout. Then I saw this article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

You might say there were some folks who visited No Wall Street Bailout and Stop the Housing Bailout during the time when the bills were under consideration. So many that they shot up into short periods of ranking in the top sixty thousand or even near the top twenty thousand sites worldwide.

As an aside, I'd like to share a resource I found helpful when trying to wrap my brain around the bailout and preceding mortgage crisis. National Public Radio's This American Life ran a story in May called "The Giant Pool of Money." It explains the fairly complicated matters in plain language, and was so helpful to so many as to have been the focus of an article in The New York Times. Among the careful walk-through of the crisis with financial experts, the program has interviews with some of the people who were raking in money hand over fist by pushing bad dangerous mortgages on Americans. The program just aired a follow-up that's similarly lucid, only this one's on the bailout: "Another Frightening Show About the Economy."

Have you found resources online or offline that were helpful as you attempted to understand the recent economic stories? Feel free to enlighten us in the comments.

Election Websites

2008-09-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

Since I have recently been exploring new sites with the aid of Alexa's new Related Links, I've been encouraged to see that sites providing political information have been receiving spikes in traffic of late. An informed citizen is the sort I'd rather have voting, and in the twenty-first century, there's plenty of information a click away for those who take their democratic responsibilities seriously.

I've been visiting FactCheck.org every couple of days. The advantage of a non-partisan organization de-spinning candidates' statements is a gift from the Internet Age. This site's Reach has increased 114% when you compare the last three months of traffic to the previous three. Predictably, spiked occur when big political events happen, such as the recent Presidential Debate. Posted the day after the debate, FactCheck's blow-by-blow breakdown of the misleading or erroneous statements of both candidates has apparently been of use to many other than myself.

Another election-year resource on the web that I've found handy is Project Vote Smart's website. This site aggregates all sorts of hard data about lawmakers: public statements, voting records, biographical information, campaign finances, and ratings of various interest groups to name a few. Though their Voter's Self-Defense Manual has been and continues to be an invaluable paper resource, the website provides a bounty of information about all things politics. Their Reach has increased 318% in the second half of the past six months.

Of course, for those political junkies who need a daily fix of if-the-election-were-held-today, there are at least two sites (thanks, Related Links) dealing with the electoral college map. I knew about Electoral-vote.com, but have identified 270ToWin.com as a competing site. While each of them predicts an Obama victory at this stage of the game, based on state-by-state polling data, they have some different ideas about the likely/possible vote count.

Which sites do you find indispensable in the quest for election facts and fun? Do their Related Links lead to new favorites?

Alexa's New Related Links

2008-09-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to tell you about Alexa's new and improved Related Links. For the last few months we have been toiling away developing devious new algorithms to tease better related links out of our Web crawl. While I can't divulge the secret sauce, I can say that the work paid off in a big way.

If you have an Alexa Toolbar or Sparky (everybody does, right?) then you can really enjoy the full benefit of the related links and start to discover more content on the web that you may find interesting. Just go to your favorite site, look at your toolbar, and see what's related; click it, and go.

If you use Alexa for more serious pursuits, such as identifying competition or planning a marketing campaign, you will find that the related links are much more on target than before. To see the related links you should either install an Alexa Toolbar, or you can go to an Alexa detail page for any site and click "Related Links".

[The above was written by Geoff Mack. Below is an addendum by Kelly Dragoo.]

Sometimes, there's just as much fun happening just a click away of which you're not even aware. I'm a big fan, for example, of lolcats. Especially since I got a puppy of my own, I take immense pleasure in photos of pets with funny, misspelled text. Imagine my joy, upon testing the new Related Links for ICanHasCheezburger, at discovering I Has a Hot Dog! Thank you, Related Links!

I also love catty commentary on celebrities and pop culture. I've been a long-time fan of The Fug Girls, but their Related Links have given me a new obsession: The Superficial. (I'll bet my boss, Geoff who wrote the above, is thrilled that our new, improved Related Links have given me more ways to goof off at my desk!)

Of course, not all of life is funny photos of pets. With the coming U.S. presidential election in November, I have been following a lot of political and news sites, trying to separate the spin from the facts. I have made frequent use of FactCheck, a non-partisan resource for distilling politics to something closer to reality than campaign promises. However, since last time I found it helpful, I had completely forgotten about OpenSecrets.org; this likewise nonpartisan site is immensely helpful when it comes to following the money that influences policy and elections, and I was reminded of it in FactCheck's Related Links. But I didn't even know about another Related Link Electoral-vote.com. This website predicts electoral votes for each state based on polling data. They even have a page comparing this day in 2008 to the same day in 2004--the possibilities for nail-biting are endless!

So whether you use them for work or for play, give the new Related Links a whirl and let us know what you think.

Presidential Campaign Events and Web Traffic

2008-09-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

With the U.S. presidential election season now in high gear, I've been interested in events that are a part of the process and how they drive web traffic. Which events on the campaign trail drive which surfers to which sites? Sometimes, an official campaign site of Senator Obama or Senator McCain will get the traffic; other times, it's political blog/forum websites that get the bump.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the official site of Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, is generally more popular than that of his Republican rival Senator John McCain. The graph to the right is an un-smoothed version of the last month to show specific dates when there was a spike in traffic to either site.

Right about August 22, when Obama announced Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, there was a huge spike of traffic to his campaign's official website. Because there were reports that some who were hoping to receive a text message of the candidate's Vice Presidential pick, but had not, some of this might be due to their hoping to find the answer there instead of on their cell phones. While I was interested in his pick, I did not opt for the cell phone option, and can probably be counted among those who spiked traffic to his site around that time, hoping to learn his choice. The second spike in traffic, in the following week, is likely related to various excitement generated by that week having been the Democratic National Convention.

I note that the only spike of note to McCain's official site happened about the same time as that second one to Obama's site. Were his followers hoping he'd steal some convention thunder and reveal his Vice Presidential pick at that time? Were they looking for some red meat rebuttal to the charges leveled against the Republicans during the course of the Convention?

Another interesting thing to observe is when McCain did announce his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, on August 29th, a Friday. While there was a big of increased activity to McCain's official site, the most interesting bump was when those who had not bothered since Friday to visit the Alaska Governor's site managed to do so on Monday, September the first. You can see this in the second graph, as well as the reasonably anticipated bump during that same week to McCain's official site during the Republican National Convention.

The graph I find most interesting is one comparing what I believe to be fairly equivalent sites on the right and left: Townhall.com and Dailykos.com. In this un-smoothed graph of a full three months of traffic, all of which has included the campaign season, primaries, etc., there's one spike that stands out. Around September 1st, after the news had settled in, all the righties and the lefties were talking about Palin.

Sometimes, a campaign's official announcements can drive traffic to its website. Other times, a significant (even historic) political development gets tongues (or keyboards) wagging all over the blogs created for political junkies. Do you see any significant spikes that correspond to a date of import in the recent months of these campaigns? Am I missing a place where others might go to discuss surprising developments like McCain's selection of Governor Palin? Let us know in the comments.

Web Traffic Versus Ticket Sales

2008-07-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

I recently noticed the popularity of the new Will Smith movie Hancock when it hit our Movers and Shakers. I'd seen it advertised on the sides of buses, but was not really sure what it was about; after a quick trip to the official site, I realized it was not-your-grandfather's-superhero flick. It was certainly popular among folks based on traffic to the website, but I wondered if this would translate into ticket sales. It ended up getting 62.6 Million dollars on opening weekend in the U.S. according to IMDBPro.com.

IMDB Pro has some really neat features, one of which enables you to look at lists of all-time highest opening Box Office films through the years. I went through and picked some recent movies that were on this list. My goal was to see if traffic to the film's website translates into Box Office receipts on the opening weekend. Because some studios direct traffic for individual films to a sub domain or sub-directory on the studio's website, I had to weed out those--Alexa tracks at the domain level. Here's what I came up with, graphing traffic to the stand-alone websites for these recently popular blockbuster releases: Hancock, Sex and the City, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Horton Hears a Who.

As you can see, the movies with the highest spike in Reach, in descending order from the most popular to the least, are Indiana Jones, Hancock, Sex and the City, and Horton Hears a Who.

According to IMDB Pro, the list of domestic opening Box Office for these four films, in descending order, is as follows:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with $127 Million.
Hancock with $62.6 Million.
Sex and the City with $56.8 Million.
Horton Hears a Who with $45 Million.

At least within this example, traffic to a film's stand-alone promotional website is a fairly accurate indicator of Opening Weekend Box Office relative to other blockbusters in the category. Thanks, IMDB. [If only The Dark Knight hadn't spread it's promotions over half a dozen URLs, we could really make some comparisons.]

Which films have you seen promoted heavily on the Web that later became smash-hits on opening weekend at the box office? Any ideas of those that tanked despite heavy promotion on stand-alone websites? Let us know in the comments.

Presidential Politics on the Web

2008-06-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

When a news story broke a few days ago about Senator John McCain's technical adviser having said, "John McCain is aware of the Internet," I was reminded of McCain's own earlier admission that, "I'm an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get."

While it's debatable whether the leader of the free world might need to know how to use a computer in order to understand its impact on everything from global business to open government, the Internet is generally agreed upon to be a handy tool for spreading one's political message and raising campaign cash. And I've noticed, in recent months, that there seems to be a trend: Republican presidential candidates are getting less traffic to their official websites than Democratic candidates.

This is a graph of the Reach (unique visitors) to the websites of the four Republican candidates I heard the most about during primary season: Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Paul, and Senator John McCain. It's easy to see that McCain's traffic is better than that going to the other candidates' sites. Now, let's add one Democratic candidate to the graph, the presumptive nominee Senator Barack Obama.

The inclusion of the Democrat so radically alters the scale of the graph that all of the Republican candidates' sites are squished down to the bottom; you can hardly see their peaks and valleys anymore. That's the only thing I changed between the two graphs: it's still Reach, it's still the same level of smoothing and same time-frame.

So not only does McCain avoid computers, but his constituency does too? Is that true? I know plenty of Republicans who use the Web, so I'm not trying to make some red state/blue state generalization about Democrats being more technically inclined. Do McCain's likely voters already know what they need to know about him? Are Republicans likelier to get their information from other media? Has McCain sent more mailings? Will this trend hold through November? Please speculate (be civil or I'll delete them) in the comments.

Oil and Gas Prices Increase Traffic to Price Comparison Tools

2008-06-17T13:06:00.001-07:00

I remember when, a few years ago, I first started to notice websites with aggregated, user-submitted gas price information, essentially gas price comparison tools.

While I don't drive, these things seemed like a lot of work to me. First, you'd have to have enough people in your area know about the sites. Then, you'd have to have enough people care enough about the sharing of information to post prices for the stations as they spotted them--and keep updating those prices. Finally, you'd have to have the time to identify the best price in your area and to drive there. I admittedly take the bus, but it still seems like a lot of work for slightly cheaper gas.

Fast-forward to now, when yesterday's price of oil per barrel saw a new high of $139.89. The graph above charts the traffic to the apparent leader in the field (from among those sites of which I'm aware) GasBuddy and its closest competitors GasPriceWatch and FuelMeUp. These sites are wildly more popular now than they were six months ago. GasBuddy alone has seen an increase in Reach of 250% when comparing the past three months' traffic to that of the previous three months.

It seems these comparison tools' time has come. With people lowering their other expenses to afford gas, reports of cars stranded on the side of the road in increasing numbers due to running on fumes, and the advent of the "Staycation", such sites are yet another possible aid. I remember when I first saw these years ago and forwarded them to my parents. I didn't hear any feedback and guessed they maybe didn't have the time to bother with finding gas they could buy and still afford food. I'm thinking I'll send them a link to this blog post.

Have you used these sites? Which is your favorite? Are there others we should check out? Let us know in the comments.

Mothers and Sweethearts

2008-05-23T16:40:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, Internet traffic data makes one scratch his or her head. In reviewing the traffic over the last six months to flower and gift sites, I've noticed something I can't quite wrap my brain around.

When comparing the traffic of three major online florists and one gift site, Tiffany.com, I notice something interesting: moms don't make out as well as sweethearts.

For all of these sites, there are the predictable spikes around holidays. Christmas is a natural, but it's not nearly as popular as Valentine's Day or Mother's Day. What perplexes me is that the spikes are higher on Valentine's day than on Mother's Day.

While I'm perpetually single and may be biased, I feel like I know more people with mothers than with sweethearts. Furthermore, I know more people who would be able to purchase flowers in person and carry them to their sweethearts; more of the people I know live fairly close to their romantic interests than their moms. Maybe I'm just a mama's boy.

Do moms get other stuff than flowers? From that angle, it makes sense--everyone knows you have to give your sweetheart flowers, chocolate, or jewelry on Valentine's Day. Maybe moms are also getting pots and pans, power tools, computers, and flat screen televisions. Last year, I gave my mom a cell phone--but we also gave her flowers.

Am I missing something? Please feel free to weigh in with a comment.

Facebook Overtakes Myspace

2008-05-07T15:52:00.001-07:00

Mark it on your calendar - April 19, 2008 - the date that Facebook overtook Myspace as the #1 social networking site on the Web.

This has been a long time coming. Facebook has been steadily increasing reach while Myspace has been treading water. Over the course of the last 8 months facebook has seen its unique visitors double, growing its reach from 4% in September of last year to 8% today... an impressive achievement by any measure.

As of this writing, Facebook is ranked as the 5th most popular site on the web, just ahead of Myspace at #6. This puts Facebook ahead of Internet heavyweights such as Wikipedia (#8) and MSN.com (#7).

Can facebook move up farther in the rankings to #4? Not anytime soon. The site currently in that position is live.com, which has more than twice the number of visitors. But who knows, at this growth rate, facebook may not be done scaling the Alexa rankings.

Good Golly, it's MOLI

2008-05-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

Is the graph to the left an indication of another social networking site crossing a threshold? The newish site MOLI just hit my radar as I was watching some graphs of recent Mover sites that aren't overnight spikes followed by a return to their former levels. This one has been on a steady climb for at least a few weeks.

I've seen enough of these things come along over time to recognize the initial pattern: social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace seem to toil in relative obscurity for a while, expanding from the people who work there and their families and friends to a larger audience with time. Then, something happens: a critical mass of those who are in the know sign on and they grow quickly. I wonder if that's what is happening with MOLI.

I am not big on social networking sites personally. I think that between my accounts on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, I have just enough connections to seem like a hermit. When YouTube came out with the tag-line "Broadcast yourself," I thought, "Well, whatever for?" I have a professional interest in these sites, but tend to prefer not to publish the quotidian, my quotidian. When the stories started coming out a couple of years ago about people leaving college and missing out on job opportunities because they were a bit to free with their personal details on such sites, I was comforted by my obscurity.

It seems MOLI might be a step in the right direction for those addicted to sharing personal details. Because the site allows you to manage multiple profiles using one account, the folks from the church social never have to know about the party animals you know--who in turn won't have any idea how boring your job is. However, because I can just see me posting my award-winning tuna casserole recipe to my social profile in a moment of reply-to-all oblivion, I think I just might stick with my journals.

Does MOLI have a niche?

The Alexa Ranking system has been changed

2008-04-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

The New Alexa Rankings

We've been working hard behind the scenes for several months and are excited to announce that our new Alexa Rankings system is available.

When Alexa began displaying rankings in 1998 it was with the goal of showing Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community. We generated the rankings through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar. Since that time we've been delighted to see that the Alexa Rankings have become a yardstick by which website popularity is measured. We are grateful to the thousands of people who come to Alexa.com each day to check the Alexa Rankings.

In recent months we've heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won't tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

Below are a few common questions we anticipate from the Alexa community, along with our answers.

My site's ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

Your ranking wasn't wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites' rankings were unaffected by such differences, we've worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.

We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.

Will you change the rankings again?

We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don't foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.

I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it's done we like it even better. We hope you will too.

We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.

Do you want to know what I think about this?

Definitely. We've been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we've done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.

Feedback is welcome.

The Power of YouTube

2008-03-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

I was looking at the most recent batch of Movers and Shakers today, and I noticed a site among the top three that is not in any way affiliated with March Madness. Once it caught my attention, I felt like digging in to see what was going on.

The site is Avaaz.org and they're into global social justice issues, organizing online, that sort of thing. They have an international staff of campaigners, so they have a decent Traffic Rank. But while they usually are in the fifty thousands, the past week they've been going below ten thousand. Why the bump? Did they purchase ads on coffee sleeves or run a commercial during a college basketball game recently?

No. They entered a contest on YouTube and won an award for best video in the political category. On the page where their video "Stop the Clash of Civilizations" is announced the winner, there's a link to their website.

Well, congrats to them for record traffic to their site, and good timing on the win given their current actions regarding the recent unrest over Tibet.

Madness, I Tell You

2008-03-24T16:55:00.001-07:00

Looking at the graph of the top three Movers, I'm reminded of how my job in Web metrics has made me (slightly) cooler. There was honestly a time when I had no idea what March Madness was--none at all. I think I occasionally heard it and associated it with springlike things: allergies and short pants.

One glance at this graph (or the previous years' versions of it), and I see two things: something big is happening related to sports; the sport in question is pretty below the radar until March. After one click-through to the sites currently experiencing huge gains in traffic, pretty much anyone who was always picked last for teams in gym class can sigh and say, "Ah, yes, college basketball championship."

Thank you, Alexa, for giving me a clue about the rest of America's obsessions.

Oscars Always a Hit on the Web

2008-03-03T15:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I look at Alexa's Movers and Shakers, I discover some hip new site everyone's clicking on.

And sometimes, I look at the graph and realize, oh, yeah, the Oscars just happened.

Lindsay Lohan is Good for Your Website's Traffic

2008-02-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

[Note: Alexa's traffic data are still delayed by about a week, so this post is a bit stale.]

Today's Movers graph pretty much tells a short story about how if you're a scandal-plagued starlet recovering from substance abuse, and you pose as an American icon from the past, the site that posts your photos will get a lot of traffic.

You're free to view the photos, but be warned; they are NSFW--or fans of Marilyn Monroe.

Freshness of Traffic Data

2008-02-21T19:43:00.000-08:00

As some of you have noticed, our traffic data is a few days behind. We are working hard to catch up, and you will see new data appearing over the next several days.

Thank you for your patience!

Firefox Continues to Impress

2008-02-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

[Note: due to some technical difficulties, the Movers data have not been updated since Friday the 15th. Rather than hold them frozen at those posted Tuesday the 12th of February, I'm updating them to the last available, reliable Movers data.]

You look at the graph and you see Mozilla. Your brain says, "Yeah, I just updated Firefox."

I'm always impressed by how much of a surge in traffic the already-popular mozilla.com gets when they put out a Firefox update. A great trickle-down effect is that in subsequent days, popular Firefox plugins get a boost as their home-sites release updates to coincide with the new Firefox revision. The number ten Mover in this list, Mincus.com's Adsense Notifier Plugin falls into this category.

Firefox Updates Reliably Increase Mozilla Traffic

2008-02-12T17:27:00.000-08:00

When I look at the current graph of the Movers and Shakers, I have three thoughts.

1) Oh right, I did just recently have a Firefox update.

2) Man, that Warcraft III Defense of the Ancients game is really popular. [note: I'm not a gamer and initially confused World of Warcraft with Warcraft III. A kind commenter named Ryan pointed out my mistake and I have corrected this item. Thank you, Ryan.]

3) That Edison Chen scandal really does equal traffic.

Scandal = Traffic

2008-02-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

When you look at the graph of our Movers and Shakers, the most striking increase among the top three is from the Mover in the number-two position, NoScript. This Firefox add-on is already popular; it has a three-month Traffic Rank of 3,799.

While the recent release of a new version of NoScript has certainly given the site's traffic a boost, it's already popular enough overall so the boost is not surprising or unprecedented. Even though it's the most vertical line on the Movers graph of the top three, it still comes in second to the top Mover, CLOT. This site doesn't usually get nearly as much traffic as NoScript, but suddenly had a huge increase in traffic, which makes the spike more significant.

There's a reason for the spike in traffic to CLOT: Scandal. CLOT is the website of an "urban lifestyle" company owned by Hong Kong movie star Edison Chen. Some illicit photos allegedly depicting Chen and various Hong Kong starlets surfaced recently, and Chen's side of the story is on his blog, hosted on the CLOT website. Suddenly, CLOT's Traffic Rank jumped from around 27,000 into the four thousands.

The third most significant Mover is Hampton Roads, the site of a Virginia news organization. Most of the increase in Alexa traffic for that site has been about another scandal: Virginia Beach police seized a large photograph from an Abercrombie and Fitch store because it was deemed obscene. Scandal equals traffic.

Of the ten Movers currently on our website, three are popular because of the Super Bowl. Two are popular because they deal with the Web and computers. The other five are the two scandal-related sites discussed above and three other celebrity gossip sites owing their increased Reach to Britney Spears and the Chen controversy. Oscar Wilde once remarked, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." If you're looking for a spike in Internet traffic, this is the case.

Alexa Data Updates

2008-02-06T16:52:00.000-08:00

As some of you have noticed, we temporarily stopped updating Alexa traffic information on January 31. We discovered some anomalies in the traffic rankings, including some inexplicable drops in traffic for a number of sites in China. We decided to halt the traffic updates until we resolved the issue. We expect to correct the problems later this evening.

Thank you for your patience!

Puppy Love. Qtrax Tops the Charts?

2008-01-31T12:50:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about Alexa's Movers and Shakers is that you can sometimes find the cool thing everyone's clicking on--even if you're too busy to comb the websites like Slashdot and Digg that track these sorts of things. Such is the case with the adorable screen cleaner flash file on linein.org. On a day when at least three of our ten Movers concern memorial surfing to sites dealing with the deceased actor Heath Ledger, it's nice to have a puppy clean your screen. [Note: that little puppy is still so darn popular since being unleashed on the cute-susceptible on January 11; the site continues to intermittently go down because of what seems likely to be a new traffic onslaught.]

The bigger story of this batch of Movers, though, is that near-vertical line on the graph for Qtrax, a new, free, legal peer-to-peer music downloading service. According to this story, that line is a mirror of what happened to the company's stock shortly after their new website launched--in reverse. Apparently, people began to note very little There there; far fewer tunes were actually available than had been forecast. Oddly, that site's not loading very reliably today either.

Would you like fries with that?

2007-11-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

“Buy a List!” You have probably seen this link posted on Alexa's pages. This offering came about because we learned over the years that visitors to our website were interested in learning which sites were in a particular range of Traffic Rank according to our data. This Top Sites List has been a simple list of Alexa’s top-ranked websites from 1 to 10,000--or even 100,000 sites.

Over time, people began to request specific Alexa data for websites on the list beyond Traffic Rank. Could they acquire, for a targeted range of Traffic Rank, additional Alexa data such as Reach or Contact Info? Could they get a list of sites in Spanish, excluding any known by Alexa to contain Adult Content?

While we understood how our data could be useful to a range of researchers and Web professionals, creating lists of this type was labor- and resource-intensive for us. Further, while anyone could take the Top Sites List and use the Alexa website to get the additional data, this was impractical if done manually and challenged our bandwidth (and Terms of Use) if done programmatically.

Thus was born Alexa’s suite of Web Services. These gave developers and researchers programmatic access to Alexa’s data. With the Alexa Web Information Service, researchers could automate queries for our numerous data points on any number of URLs. Marketers could query our Alexa Top Sites Service for the most popular sites in a particular country.

“But,” we began to hear, “I don’t have enough programming experience to write the queries to your Web Services. Can’t I just get a customized list of the top sites in China, their Contact Info, and what they were ranked two years ago?”

Well, Alexa is now offering lists with more options! The lists are sorted by global Traffic Rank, or Rank in a particular country, city, or category (based on our Directory listing). Once you have identified your custom list of URLs, you can add more data for each URL. Examples of this extra data include the site's contact information, category, and even historical Alexa traffic going back to 2001. The entire list of extra data you can add to the custom order is:

Reach (current 3 month global average)
Page Views (current 3 month global average)
Historical Rank (for a specific day in the past 5 years)
Historical Reach (for a specific day in the past 5 years)
Historical Page Views (for a specific day in the past 5 years)
Rank by Country or City (current 3 month average)
Reach by Country or City (current 3 month average)
Page Views by Country or City (current 3 month average)
Contact Info
Category
Sites Linking In (how many)
Related Links (upto 11)
Speed of the site (based on average page load times)
Keywords related to the site
Adult Content flag (yes/no)
Language
Domains with similar registration info

Please visit our Custom Top Sites List page to place your order.

Google vs. YouTube?

2007-10-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, Microsoft Live passed MSN in daily rank; you should expect to see this reflected in Alexa's three-month rank any day now. The next sites in line for succession --- MySpace and Facebook --- currently lack the reach to upset the Top5. In the middle of this Microsoft dance are Google and YouTube. The following graph illustrates some interesting trends.

As you can see, for the last five weekends YouTube (in teal) has out-ranked not only Live (in black) but also Google (in red), making it the #2 site on the internet. This raises two questions: 1.) Really? and, 2.) Why? To understand this trend, let's first take a look the corresponding reach and traffic graphs.

These graphs show that Google always has more unique users per day than YouTube but that every weekend, Google loses traffic whereas YouTube gains. This is not so far-fetched: the other search engines in the Top5 --- Yahoo! and Live --- show the same general trend. In fact, youtube.com has (for several months) had more overall traffic than google.com. This is also not far-fetched because of the different natures of these sites. When people go to Google, they are searching for content that is likely elsewhere. On the other hand, people that go to YouTube are going for the content on YouTube. Taking into account that (in general) search engines are a means and video sites are an end, it is not unreasonable that YouTube could get more pageviews per user (and more traffic) than Google.

This isn't the whole story, though. Another big difference between Google and YouTube is the way they use international domains, or ccTLDs. If I go to http://www.google.co.uk, I get the British version of Google and that traffic counts for google.co.uk, not for google.com. If I go to http://www.youtube.co.uk, I get redirected to http://uk.youtube.com and that traffic counts for youtube.com. In the Alexa Top100, Google is represented by their .com plus 19 ccTLDs. Each of these international sites pulls in between 0.1% and 0.3% of the daily traffic Alexa sees. Adding that to the 2.2% pulled in by google.com, Google's search sites get at least 6.0% of daily pageviews, which beats YouTube's 3.0% hands down. (Also of note: this beats Yahoo!'s 4.8% and they pull the same ccTLD trick that YouTube does, when possible. There are some exceptions --- yahoo.co.jp is an example --- due to individual registry rules.)

So the answers to the questions posed above depend on what you mean by "Google," i.e. whether it is a site, a brand, or a company. The first would be only google.com; the second would include google.com, google.fr, google.com.br, google.de, etc. The last would include those properties plus YouTube, Orkut, Blogger, et al. The point is that those are important questions to ask when doing traffic analysis on the web. Be wary of analyses that fail to take these kinds of issues into account, especially if the analyst incorrectly uses statistics. (Luckily, some people get it right.)

Beyond the New Black

2007-10-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to my post about "The New Black," here are more graphs for your consideration. I actually intended to write this up last week but I guess late is the new early. Jumping right in, as a computer scientist, I'm interested in programing language trends. The graph below was seeded from the list of programming languages on Wikipedia.

One of my co-workers was offended that "Python is the new Basic," so I guess I should talk about my interpretation of the data. The statement does not say that Python imitates, replaces, or has the same warts as BASIC. My translation is "Whereas BASIC was popular (or well-known) in the past, Python is now popular (and well-known) in a similar way, today." This is certainly the case for "HTML is the new assembly," given that assembly is a basic building block for compiled programs and HTML is a basic building block for the web. People (and computers) haven't forgotten about assembly; rather, the web has its own version of something similar.

The strongest links in the graph are, in order

C is the new assembly
Java is the new COBOL
SQL is the new HTML
Ruby is the new PHP

These mirror the way people think about most of these languages already. C has been called a portable assembler, Java and COBOL are both often thought of as business languages, SQL is behind a lot of dynamically generated HTML, and Ruby (on Rails) is competing with PHP for building web applications.

The only double-edge in the graph is between Java and C (including C++), which is indicative of the long-standing feud between developers on both sides. (It does raise the question as to why .NET is nowhere to be found.) The other cycle is from XML to XML, a testament to the eXtensibility of that standard.

And for those of you who I lost at the top of the post, I took the liberty of putting together of different sports and leagues, below. Enjoy!

What can Alexa do for you?

2007-10-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Summer is over and I am putting together my to-do list for Alexa, trying to figure out what we are going to be working on for the next year. But before I break out my pencil, I thought I'd ask you first.

If you have about a minute and a half, take this brief survey and tell me what's on the top of your Alexa wish list:

Survey

Thanks.

Shake Up in the Alexa Top 10

2007-10-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

Some of you noticed that this week, Google and MSN traded places in Alexa's Top 10 list. Actually, it's better to say that google.com and msn.com traded places, in order to avoid getting confused. This is mostly due to a significant drop in traffic for msn.com; in fact, because Alexa's Top Sites list is based on three months of data, it's been clear for weeks that MSN and Google were going to cross paths. All of this makes sense when you take into account Microsoft's campaign to promote their Live brand, with live.com at #5 and rising.

Fewer noticed that Hi5 and Baidu switched places. This would have happened sooner, except for August 30th. What happened that day? In some Latin American countries it's the Feast of Saint Rose of Lima. It's no coincidence that August 30th is a national holiday in Peru, from which Hi5 gets 12% of its users. So is it fair to compare the two when Baidu gets 90% of its users from China? It depends on what you're looking for.

For instance, youtube.com (currently at #4) get's 13% of its users from the US whereas Google's .com gets 26% of its users from the US. Compare this with myspace.com, which is globally at #6 but gets 45% of its users from the US where it is currently #3. These demographics are almost certainly important when making business decisions, which is why Alexa produces top sites lists for countries, languages, and categories.

Taking a look at our current Top 10, we have

Yahoo!
Google
MSN
YouTube
Windows Live
MySpace
Orkut
Facebook
Wikipedia
Hi5

So four of the top five are web portals, with Yahoo! still the king of hill. Of the other top spots, five are social networking sites and one is a collaborative encyclopedia. Those sparklines contain 4 months worth of 1 week averages; the traffic drop you can see a quarter from the right is Labor Day Weekend. I found it interesting that Orkut took a dip but, unlike the other sites, did not recover. The drop is due to fewer pageviews without a loss in reach.

If it's hard to imagine that the US could have such a big impact on a site that gets most of its reach from Brazil, consider what would happen if a small number of users who were responsible for a greater-than-average number of pageturns suddenly disappeared. The demographic would not significantly change even though there was a significant impact to traffic. I suspect that many Americans (responsible for an more than their fair share of hits on that site) went to BBQs that weekend, realized the people at the party were on other networks, and made the switch. Is it significant that Facebook, which gets 30% of its users from the US, had a drop in unique users that Friday with a less-than-proportional drop in pageviews the same day?

So what's the point? Fundamentally: Alexa ranks websites, not companies. In the global Top 10, Microsoft takes two spots and Google takes three. This traffic can only be properly understood by taking global demographics into account. Finally, a site's rank is dependent on its traffic in relation to other sites. That is, your site's rank can change even if your traffic does not --- or visa-versa --- due to relative traffic changes on other sites with similar rank.

Battle of the Game Consoles

2007-10-02T14:36:00.001-07:00

Last week, the Google Blog posted a story about search trends and video game systems, namely a comparison between searches for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii.

Looking at the Google Trends graph next to an Alexa Traffic Graph (reach) for xbox.com, playstation.com, and wii.com, you can see mostly the same trends. In 2005-Q4, the Xbox is clearly the winner in both searches and traffic, for very good reason: of the three, it was the only one actually available. The traffic for “Playstation 3” correlates to the Tokyo Game Show, at which several games for the (then non-functional) system were demoed. The name “Wii” was only officially announced in 2006-Q2, which shows up as a bump in searches, at flag A. This does not translate into traffic for wii.com because the domain was parked until at least July of that year, which can be verified by taking a look at the Wayback Machine.

All three consoles have search and traffic surges in 2006-Q4; since then, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have been neck-and-neck in both traffic and searches, though their reach appears to be increasing. Wii, however, has remained level, after the initial peak. If you compare wii.com and nintendo.com, the name announcement and the console launch are both clearly visible. In actuality, the news volume (which is down) more closely resembles the traffic for Nintendo (and Wii) than the number of searches. So the question becomes: what will happen to Wii this winter? Is it just a late bloomer?

Fred Thompson pulls into 2nd place behind... Ron Paul?

2007-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

Now that Fred Thompson has (finally) officially announced that he is running for the presidency, we can check his Web site's Alexa stats to see how popular he is with the online crowd. It turns out that he is popular. Here is the graph of the republican candidates:

That red line with the big spike... that is Fred08.com. The spike in Fred Thompson's graph occurred on the day that he announced his candidacy on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno while the other candidates were having yet another televised debate. Apparently, skipping the debate to hang out with Jay Leno paid off.

Another thing to notice is the jump on Ron Paul's popularity. His online traffic is represented by the blue line. He struck a chord with viewers of the debates and was declared the hands-down winner in a Fox news poll, which gave him quite an impressive lift online, further securing his impressive lead over the other candidates. The "leading" republican candidates, Romney, McCain and Guiliani... not so much. Their online traffic continues to come in at a trickle.

The race is on... let's see if Fred can catch Ron Paul.

What is more popular online, golf or tennis?

2007-09-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Tennis was very popular when I was growing up. We had all the big stars like Connors, McEnroe and Borg. And the ladies were popular too, with Evert and Navratilova. Golf on the other hand was much less popular. Tennis waxed and Golf waned.

Over the last 10 years or so, courses have changed. Golf is very popular now and tennis.... not so much.

I was looking at our movers and shakers today and noticed that usopen.org was on the list. Is that golf or tennis? Turns out that usopen.org is tennis, while usopen.com is golf. Confusing huh? On a whim I plotted the two on a graph and reset the time range to "max." Guess who's more popular?

Tennis.

Turns out that for as long as we've tracked them the Tennis US Open has been more popular than the Golf US Open. Take a look at the graph. In fact, the disparity between the two has been increasing pretty dramatically over the last 4 years to the point that the usopen.org is now getting approximately 4 times the number of visitors as the usopen.com.

I really had no idea that tennis would be more popular and am at a loss to explain why. Is tennis more of a "stats" oriented sport that attracts people to the Web site? Does tennis do a better job of promoting their site to the television audience? Or is tennis just simply providing a better site?

Anybody want to take a side bet on wimbledon.org vs usopen.org? Here's the graph.

ATTN: Sales & BizDev. Alexa Just Got More Useful.

2007-09-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

For years sales, bizdev and marketing folks have used Alexa to identify sites in their target market and contact them. Alexa has been great at the first half of that equation -- identifying sites -- and poor at the second half. The contact info available on Alexa has been meager at best.

Now, we have partnered with Jigsaw to complete the equation. 500,000 websites come with enhanced contact information via Jigsaw.

Here's an example: Let's say you are looking at the social networking space and via Alexa you have determined that you should be working with hi5.com. They are a high traffic site and one of the leaders in the space. How do you contact hi5.com? Go to Alexa's Overview page for Hi5 (here) and you'll see links to the Jigsaw contact info right there.

Or, let's say your are in the mapping space. You have looked at Alexa's Related links, and gone through the directory to find all of the most popular sites that have online maps. You decide that you need to get in touch with Mapquest. Go to Alexa's Overview page for Mapquest (here) and you'll see links to over 50 contacts at Mapquest sorted by department and by level.

Give it a shot. I hope you are as impressed with the Jigsaw data as I am.