Some time back I started tracking Alexa rank movement VS. actual traffic to four sites I control. I did this mainly because I believe the Alexa rank to be very inaccurate (and most would agree) and am puzzled by the fact that so many Internet pros use it to help with website valuation.

An aquantance of mine bought a site and paid a hefty price because the sites Alexa rank was taken into the sites value.  He based his traffic estimation on the fact that he already had an established site getting n visitors and his site’s Alexa ranking was not as good as the site he was purchasing. He believed that his new acquisition would have 2x+ the traffic of his existing site because its Alexa score was more than 3x better than his.

At this point you can guess he was very disappointed after the purchase.  The site was over-valued and had actual traffic far below expectation. His own site with the far worse Alexa rank outperformed his new site many times over.

If you read my post about real traffic vs. Alexa guesstimate you can see for yourself that a site’s traffic really should not be estimated using Alexa for any type of business decisions.

These are the 4 sites I tracked over a few months from a previous post (the first 2 sites are over 5 years old and the last 2 are under a year)

Site 1 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 725k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 1k daily / alexa 800k  / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 700 daily / alexa 2M+ / page views 2

1 month later

Site 1 traffic 1.4k daily / alexa 660k / page views 2

Site 2 traffic 800 daily / alexa 165k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 2k daily / alexa 620k  / page views 1

Site 4 traffic 900 daily / alexa 1.5M+ / page views 2

2 months later

Site 1 traffic 1.3k daily / alexa 585k / page view 2

Site 2 traffic 900 daily / alexa 160k / page views 2

Site 3 traffic 3k daily / alexa 260k  / page views 2

Site 4 traffic 1.2k daily / alexa 670k / page views 2

Anyway, A few interesting things have happened in the last few months. The site I was tracking as site 3 had an image that gained 1st page social bookmarking status for a few days. Now, I am talking about an image that got linked to heavily, not the home page or anything important. The traffic being sent to the image did not reach any of the main pages and the traffic was pretty much useless towards the site itself since people looked at the image then commented about it on the social site.

Alexa picked up that totally useless image traffic and the site spiked to under 50k Alexa, however, what is interesting is that after the image was no longer popular and the link was removed, the Alexa ranking came back down (up), it leveled out at a much better rank than before the spike even though real traffic had actually gone down a bit. Actually, just about every time there has ever been a spike in traffic, Alexa seems to pick it up.

It’s all very interesting and the only thing any of this seems to prove is that while Alexa may be a great tool to track trends, it really should not be used to gauge real traffic when trying to compare different sites. Just because your site A has an Alexa rank of 80k with n traffic does not mean that site B with same Alexa has the same traffic.

I keep a list of about 100 different sites with the real traffic stats as measured by a java script tracker. I will have to take the time to post those and the Alexa scores for each site to do a larger comparison. well, as soon as I find the time to look up so many sites in Alexa.