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Monday, March 21, 2011

Alexa: A Tool for Internet Research


Alexa is a Web Information Company commenced in 1996.  It is a subsidiary of Amazon and is headquarters are located in San Francisco, California, USA.  It is popular for knowing Web traffic and web ranking details.

However, it provides you with other details too and some of them are mentioned below:   

  • Like Google, it shows a list of hot trends and hot topics.
  • You can check the results by daily, weekly and monthly basis.
  • You can also know them by country wise or category wise. 
  • If you want to dig into past records, you can go to achieves.
  • You can know the ranking of top sites at global level. 
  • It also shows a list of hot products.
  • You can audit your website with Alexa site.
  • When you make a study of a website, you can know details such as how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated.
  • It provides the Internet Archive through the Way Back Machine.
  • It also shows Page views per User, Bounce Rate, Time on Site, Demographics, Click stream and Search Traffic stats.

However, Alexa faces certain criticism too as there is some debate about the accuracy of Alexa's rankings.  Rankings of less popular websites are not as accurate as the rankings of highly popular websites.  It is due to the lack of data and statistic laws related to the long tail distribution.  Alexa ranking results often contradict with the ranking results of other tools.  Many in the web marketing community still question the accuracy of the results shown by Alexa.

Written by: S. Chandrashekara Reddy

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