MarkBeljaars.com

Alexa “The web information company” specializes in the collection of Internet based information and freely releases a daily updated Internet popularity ranking called the Alexa Ranking. This measure is often used by SEO marketers and affiliate merchants as a gauge of a sites popularity, and hence its earning potential. Alexa ranks sites from 1 to 5 million+. Sites in the top 10 include Google, Youtube and Facebook. Amazon ranks around 20. The full list is available here and the top 1 million sites can also be downloaded as a CSV file.

Alexa derives site popularity by determining the overall percentage of Internet users who visit a site in any given day. For example, Alexa has determined that 0.001% of all Internet users visited my site yesterday, and therefore that earns me a ranking of 385,625 meaning that there are 385,000+ sites that receive more traffic than mine. Overall this is a great result for a site that is less than 3 months old, but it is not correct as I will explain below.

Alexa gains traffic information from users who have installed the free Alexa toolbar. When a user installs the toolbar, the user is requested to supply information such as gender, age, education and so on. Once installed, the toolbar offers information to surfers as they visit sites such as 6 month traffic trending, ranking and so on. The information gleamed from users is alo available to webmasters to help determine visitor demographics. My statistics are shown below…

Astute readers may have noticed that there is a major flaw in the Alexa Rankings. People who tend to install toolbars are more savvy than your average Internet user and as such Alexa Ranking results are heavily skewed towards technical sites such as mine. For this very reason, Alexa Rankings should not be used as a golden measure of a sites popularity but instead be looked upon as a rough guide.

The Internet Archive is an amazing long running concept that aims to create an archive of all web pages at various points in time. The archive and a tool called the Way Back Machine allow you to see what a site looked like when it started and how it progressed as time passed by. This is fantastic fun. For example, check out google (I wonder if they knew they’d be billionaires in a few years) or early versions of microsoft.com. The archive itself consist of 2 petabytes (that’s 2 x 1024 X 1024 Gigabytes!) and is growing at 20 terabytes (20 x 1024 Gigabytes) a month. That is an amazing amount of data.

There is also a serious side to the Archive. Most people work hard (scammers, spammers and some affiliate markers excluded) to provide web pages that contain useful or informative material. It is sad to see this information disappear if the site is closed down. The Way Back Machine ensures that the material will live on forever. This is extremely important as Yahoo’s Geocities was shut down in October 2009. Geocities has been long running and as a result thousands of pages that used to exist are now no more. As many authors have now moved or passed on (check out the poetry from this author who passed at an youngish age and who inspired reocities – a dedicated Geocities archive) this information has not been replicated elsewhere and would now be lost forever if not for projects like the Internet Archive. I am an editor with the DMOZ project and have personally had to delete Geocities sites from the archive with no replacement. This is frustrating.

Finally, the Internet Archive can also be used as a source of inspiration. I look at sites that have been operational for a few years and gain tremendous inspiration from how poor they looked a couple of short years ago. It is important to remember that your sites will not be best in class from the onset.