Using Online Resources to Measure Website Popularity
http://www.bloggingspell.com/alexa-traffic-ranking/
What criteria do we use to determine whether a website is popular? How do we know if a certain website is more popular than another? There are numerous online resources dedicated to answering such types of questions, each using a slightly different algorithm. One of the most known analytics services is Alexa. When searching up a website on Alexa, Alexa returns data such as page rank, bounce rate, daily pageviews per visitor, daily time on site, percentage of views from search, and number of sites linking to that website, among other metrics. Alexa also ranks websites according to different countries’ data.
However, even with all of these interesting metrics provided on their site, Alexa is not viewed as a reputable service for ranking websites by many people, such as Abrar Mohi Shafee in “Alexa Ranking: Is That A Reliable Traffic Measurement Tool?” The greatest reason is that Alexa only uses data collected from people who use the Alexa toolbar. This severely inhibits Alexa from making an accurate measure of a website’s popularity, especially for website with particularly low ranks like 100,000 as higher, since many people do not have the Alexa toolbar. Therefore, Alexa rankings do not use a large enough sample size to garner metrics accurate enough to reflect the popularity of the lesser known websites.
There is also the debate of whether page views is a good enough measure of a site’s popularity. As discussed in class, when people search up something via a search engine such as Google, the search engine uses an certain algorithm to display the best results first. This algorithm takes into account pages that a particular website links to, as well as pages that link to that particular website. However, although Google’s page rankings are fairly accurate, page views should not be disregarded altogether, since certain websites might be popular but rarely searched for or linked to. Therefore, both page views and links should be considered when ranking websites based on popularity.