Alexa is a company that provides a world ranking for all websites on the Internet.
I love this idea.
When I played a lot of tennis I often wished that I could have a world tennis ranking, so I would know how many tennis players I still needed to overtake in my quest for glory.
I imagined a weekly notice from the tennis officials, telling me, Congratulations, your ranking has increased 143,643 places and you are now ranked 8,200,505th in the world.
Unfortunately, world tennis rankings don’t go past 2,000 so my dream of a world tennis ranking remains a dream. Not so, however, the almost as exciting dream of a world website ranking.
Alexa provides toolbars for popular web browsers. Install one, and Alexa will start telling you the ranking of every website you visit, while also adding your browsing habits to its statistics.
There are, of course, many problems with this method of ranking web sites, in particular, webmaster oriented sites get a huge advantage, but I prefer to ignore these trivial weaknesses, and instead concentrate on watching my website climb the rankings, pushing aside less awesome sites.
I’m not sure if visiting your own website yourself adds to your Alexa stats, but just to be sure I tend to visit Supernifty at least 1,000 times daily.
You should do the same. Visit Supernifty that is, not your own undeserving site.
The main problem with the Alexa ranking is knowing what a ranking really means. To help out on this, Supernifty has put together a simple table for evaluating your website, based on its Alexa ranking.
Simply look up your ranking, then check it against the table below.
Ranking |
|
Evaluation |
15 million |
|
You don’t even visit your own website? That’s embarassing. |
5 million |
|
OK, so now you’re visiting your own site. |
3 million |
|
Your Mum has also seen your website. |
2 million |
|
Your Mum has a dog, it likes to surf the net. |
1 million |
|
Your family and all family pets clearly are visiting your site. |
500k |
|
Your site is officially proper*. |
200k |
|
Your site is officially pretty good*. |
20k |
|
ur site is beats lolcats.com. |
5k |
|
Congratulations! You are more popular than Hillary Clinton. |
1500 |
|
Time to run for president. You just passed Barack Obama. |
3-100 |
|
To reach the coveted top 100, your site will need that something special. If you’re not a mega software company, or owned by Google, your site must contain at least one of the following: social networking; zillions of sites combined; porn; illegal downloads; or image/video sharing. That’s a tip for reaching the top 100. |
2 |
|
You are God |
1 |
|
God has an Uncle? |
So now you know how good your site is, and by extension, how good you are.
* Supernifty certified. Stickers available on request.