The Mystery Of The Outrageously Low Alexa Rank

So I've been reading about Alexa rankings, which is basically a measurement of the traffic one receives to his or her website. I won't really go into detail about how it works (mostly because I don't really know, and I'm not about to make stuff up... not this time at least), but basically, a HIGHER Alexa ranking should mean that your site is getting LESS traffic compared to another site with a LOWER Alexa ranking.

Higher Alexa = Lower Traffic

Lower Alexa = Higher Traffic

So if your site has an Alexa rank of 6,345,654, don't go bragging about that. A 20, on the other hand, should mean that your site is quite popular. Notice how I keep using the word "should". Many people argue that Alexa ranking really isn't a very reliable way of measuring the traffic volume of websites. Again, I won't really go into detail, but I'd have to say that I'm more inclined to agree with that. You see, I checked the Alexa rank of this blog today and it comes in at an outrageously low number of 16! To give you an idea of how low that is, Friendster's Alexa rank is 20. So it should mean that my blog is getting more traffic than Friendster! Clearly not the case...

I took a screen shot of my ranking as it was displayed by my SearchStatus toolbar (which is a Firefox add-on that lets the browser display Alexa and Google Page Ranks):

I checked out two other blogs that belonged to my friends and found that they, too, had Alexa ranks of 16:

Straight On 'Til Morning

Poutyisms

All our blogs are on blogger so I suspected that that probably has something to do with these seemingly inaccurate rankings. So I went to the Alexa.com website to double check if my blog really does have an Alexa rank of 16, and here's what I saw:

The Alexa rank being displayed by my SearchStatus toolbar was the one for the Blogger.com homepage (which is 16), and not the rank for my actual blog. It probably means that my Alexa rank for this blog is non-existent, so the toolbar just displayed that of Blogger.com, which is where my blog lives. The non-existence of this blog's Alexa rank does however support the assumption that yes, I probably only have 3 readers.

So that, my 3 dear readers explains the mystery of my outrageously low Alexa rank. Not all blogspot blogs will display an Alexa rank of 16, however. Many of the older ones (who've come to have more incoming traffic) will display their very own rankings, but for those of you who come to find that your blogspot blog displays a ranking of 16, you can tell other people, "Hey, my blog's Alexa rank is higher than Friendster's!" Of course if you say that to people who actually know about Alexa ranks, they'll probably think your either lying, crazy or stupid. Those happen to be the names of my 3 readers, by the way.

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