Alexa Ranking

Alexa is a well known web information company that helps provide a good guide to a website's rankings. At present Little Yellow Duck has a ranking of 3,421,812



The figure given represents the approximate number of web sites in the world that have the popularity higher than the given site. It is expressed in relatively big numbers (the smaller the better). 



Alexa ranking is computed and unlike Google rank, it directly reflects the popularity and does not officially depend on links from other sites, directory inclusion, duplicate content and so on.

For the purpose of this project we will be using it alongside Google Rank. Little Yellow Duck has a Google ranking of 1 out of 10.



Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Firefox and Chrome. Hence the page is only ranked between users who have these sidebars installed and may be biased if a specific audience is reluctant to do this (Windows Defender has classified the sidebar as a trojan, a form of malware.. Also, the rank is based on three month data and takes a long time to reflect changes in content that may happen after the domain has been sold. 



Whilst there is some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior, it is a relatively clearly defined (number of sites more popular than your site), when other ranking systems (like Google rank) are much more complex, not fully public and the "official" value may be very different from the actual value.



However we are going to use both systems to see how we get on.