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.