Alexa Traffic Rank, according to what the managers of the company that supports the service, Amazon, told us, disappears on May 1, 2022. This means for many users that it is impossible to assess the number of visitors that a certain website has.
We wrote what we show below about Alexa Traffic Rank, except for the last section, in April 2018. More than four years have passed and the service has undergone notable changes, focused on the collection of data and the value that, as a consequence, Therefore, they offer these.
All of us who manage one or more websites want to know the impact they have or have on the Internet. For this we can resort to traditional methods, the analysis of the statistics provided by the web server or those provided by Google Analytics and other services with similar characteristics . The visitors of a page cannot use the indicated methods, they must resort to other systems. The best of all and the most used will be Alexa Traffic Rank , a system that had been active for a long time and that showed relevant information about any website.
About Alexa Traffic Rank
This system collected the data it displayed using the so-called Alexa Browser Extension , valid to be installed in web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. When a user visited a website, the extension was in charge of collecting information to, after using a particular algorithm, indicate what position it occupied worldwide and in the country in which it was registered, as well as the number of sites that linked to it. a list of similar sites and the average loading time, among other aspects.
Until 2020, Alexa allowed a widget to be integrated into web pages, which displayed part of the previous information. Now it no longer existed, but what could be installed is a code in order to carry out a more precise measurement of visits. This option, of course, had a cost, but, obviously, it is no longer valid.
Number of websites worldwide
According to the latest published calculations, there are currently 1.8 billion websites worldwide. If we installed the indicated extension in our web browser, we could find out the data that Alexa displayed about the website we were visiting, in the event that it occupied a position that was not much higher than position two million. To expand the information, all you had to do was click on the domain URL at the top of the small window that opened when you click on the extension icon.
To consider
If we resorted to the tool that they offer us in How to know the daily visitors of an Internet website , we could know the number of monthly visitors to the site after entering the position it occupies worldwide. It is clear that the formula does not work with precision, but it could give us a rough idea about the relevance of any site.
In any case, if we wanted to know all the information collected by Alexa Traffic Statistics , we would only have to write the url of the site after accessing the page that shows it by clicking on the previous link. We would see the ranking at the global level, with a graph that shows the evolution or involution in recent months, and the ranking at the local level. We would also have information on the distribution of the audience, on the bounce rate , on the pages viewed per visitor daily and on the time they remain on the site. They also showed a graph on search traffic, on the sites that linked to the analyzed website, or on the demographic data of the audience, among other sections.
What is currently happening
Until shortly before the disappearance, the information collected by Alexa Traffic Rank did not have much to do with reality. Thus, for example, if we analyzed the position in the world ranking and, using some other tool, we looked for the visits that it brings with it, we can verify that they do not correspond to reality.
And there are still more. For example, in our case, we could see that the Rank in Pakistan was shown, which means that, according to Alexa, our site had the highest number of visitors in that country, which is totally false. And there is much more. As a consequence of this, we can affirm that this service did not evolve but quite the contrary, it involuted. As we can see, it is normal for Alexa Traffic Rank to disappear.
