Design Challenges

Alexa Ranking

Where I'm currently employed, alexa ranking is a big thing. Our whole business is based on this number. For those of you not familiar with alexa ranking, it is an independent company, owned and operated by amazon, who measures how popular Web sites are.

Our number has been steadly declining (the lower the number the better your site) and we hit our all time low today of 1994. That is, our site is number 1994 out of all the sites in the world. WOW!!!!!

Alexa works very much like the nielsen rating in that this number is based on a statistical sample with the difference that to participate in the sample you simply download the spyware/virus free toolbar.

I recommend you start paying attention to this number if you expect to expand your sites traffic. This will also measures how well you are search engine optimized. But that's a topic for another day.