Alexa Rank Monitoring

July 25th, 2009

by John R. Sedivy

As our Alexa ranking has been significantly improving over the past few months my interest in monitoring the rank has grown. Today I have taken an interest as to the websites that have a better rank than ours.

We had downloaded the Alexa “Top 1,000,000 Sites” spreadsheet which lists the top 1 million websites and is updated daily. Unfortunately we have found this spreadsheet to have limited use for two reasons. First, the spreadsheet is so large, that it nearly brings our computers to a grinding halt – especially when you have multiple programs running. Note that we are Mac users here and the spreadsheet is in Excel – although Amy and I both run Microsoft Office for Mac.

In any event – 1 million is a large number – in my opinion it would be more useful to break this spreadsheet down into manageable chunks, perhaps in 100,000 website chunks, so individuals can download their range of interest. Second, the spreadsheet uses 1 month averages when determining website rank – not the 3 month average as displayed on the Alexa toolbar and highlighted on their main site.

Tracking With Sparky
Based on the limitation we have taken matters into our own hands. Our workaround is to track the numbers of each site that we visit as displayed on the Alexa Toolbar, making note for future reference. The numbers with a higher rank, and closest to us will be noted. For more on the Alexa Firefox Toolbar, “Sparky” refer to my article “SEO Part III: Useful Tools”.

Our current rank at the time of this writing as reported by Sparky is 335,598. Here are the next five that we are aware of with their corresponding Alexa rank:

1. Hitsville – 301,489
2. Global Sugar Art – 288,646
3. WP-Smooth – 272,628
4. Cake Journal – 260,141
5. Cake Spy – 215,068

Some of the listed websites are really far from us in terms of rank, but this list will be updated as more information becomes available. In the meantime it’s a reasonable starting point.

Why Monitor?
You may ask why we bother tracking these stats. For me it is a simple matter of motivation. Thinking back to my time in the Marines, we would have to run three mile runs on a regular basis as part of a physical fitness test. The better the time on your run, the better your chances for promotion. Overall I find running to be pretty tedious, and need something to motivate me in the short term, other than the end objective. My short term motivation was watching the person just ahead of me and working to outrun them. After the next person was surpassed, it was time to move on to the next, the process repeated until the end of the run.

I view our Alexa ranking in much the same light. By breaking down the overall objective into manageable pieces it is easier to maintain high levels of motivation. In addition, it exposes us to new websites that are out there, of which we were previously unaware. Of course, as we mentioned in early articles, what you focus on expands – our focus on traffic and rank should further our long term performance.

-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding