Alexa is a company owned by Amazon.com, which has its main purpose to improve web navigation through participation from its users. Alexa does a lot more than simple rank web sites. They also have data services and webmaster services designed to improve the web. Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. We can find out how our web site traffic stacks up against all our competitors. This is one of the most accurate freely available tools to find out how well your site ranks up against millions of other sites on the Web. Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site overview pages, traffic detail pages and Related link pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box. If you want to view a ranking on a site you must either go to www.alexa.com and type in the site you want information about or do what the majority of people do install the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. When you install the Alexa toolbar on your browser any site you visit displays its Alexa ranking on the toolbar. You can simply click on this ranking and you will then be directed to Alexa’s website where you can view more information about the website. When you have the Alexa toolbar installed every site you visit in a given day is given a vote for that day. If you visit a site multiple times during the day you visit is only counted once. Alexa watches how many pages you view on that site and records that as well and will continually count the number of pages you view throughout the day. Alexa calls the counting of each visit “reach” and the counting of page visits “page views.” Every day Alexa takes these two figures, and the figures from the last three months and calculates the traffic rank for each web site by applying a geometric mean calculation to them. From these calculations Alexa ranks sites. From these calculations Alexa ranks sites. The ranking is from the number one site to as many sites as there are. The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site is. Alexa rates a site for the traffic, which has visited over a period of months. This gives a stable realistic view of a site measure of traffic and how it ranks compared to other sites. By using a three-month period the Alexa rankings are less subject to manipulation. Alexa only calculates for websites in their database because in order to get counted a site has to be visited by someone with a toolbar installed. And everyone doesn’t have a toolbar installed. So there may be a site visited every day by thousands of people not in Alexa rankings. Just looking at the top sites you can see that the heavily used sites on the Internet are ranked very low in Alexa.
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