Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

In this article, we will discuss about the importance of the Alexa Rank as it relates to site monetization while briefly discussing some of the weaknesses involved in using Alexa ranking as a reliable traffic measure for any website.

Besides this overview of Alexa ranking, you also can find some very useful strategies to increase your Alexa ranking from How to Increase Alexa Ranking.

What's Alexa Ranking

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. For those who have visited your web site without Alexa toolbar, these kinds of traffic won't be counted in Alexa ranking.

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your website's or blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews are just three of the networks which base your ad selling strength on Alexa Ranks.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. But unfortunately, in an imperfect world, Alexa is the only public method people can get some basic understanding about the traffic of a web site, and it still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.

We don't go into more detail about the defects of Alexa’s ranking system here. What’s primarily important to us is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

We can not be concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

Can one actually game or manipulate the Alexa Ranking?

There are methods which will allow you to easily bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the 100,000 level. However, bringing it past the 10,000 or 1,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process, because of the stiff competition among websites.

Some have adamantly stated that there are no proven ways to game Alexa, while others have claimed that auto-surfs and scripts do work to some degree.

From my viewpoint, it's quite hard to maintain the Alexa ranking by cheating Alexa using auto-surf software. Alexa has its own method to find this fraud traffic out and clean your Alexa data.

And in How to Increase Alexa Ranking, we will discuss about some very effective way to increase your Alexa ranking, which have been proved by a lot of web sites or Bloggers. Alexa ranking is inaccurate but it's important!