Google Page Rank vs Alexa Rank
When you wish to collect some money over the Internet from companies that want to use your site to advertise their products, you have to make sure that you have a high rank in at least one of these two scales. But which one is more important? Let’s examine the issue and find out together. However, first we need to explain what is what, because I’m sure many of you haven’t even heard of Alexa Rank.
What is Alexa Rank?
Alexa is a subsidiary to Amazon (at least I’m sure you’ve heard that one), but it was founded in 1996 as an independent company, acquired by the corporate giant in 1999. Now that we got the trivia out of the way, let’s get down to what this Alexa Rank actually is. In simple terms, it ranks your site based on the traffic you receive. It follows how many unique IP visit your site, and how many pages they look at. In other words, it measures how important your site is from a traffic perspective. The more traffic you get, the better. Needless to say the top sites are Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other.
There are several different options you can choose when checking the rank. One of the options is country – some sites will naturally be more popular in some countries than others, which can play a major role if the products advertised are from the said country.
The problem with Alexa, however (and the most major point of its critique) is the fact that it doesn’t automatically gather the statistics. Instead, it relies on something called “Alexa Toolbar”, meaning that the traffic measurements consider only people who have the toolbar installed. This makes it unreliable in some experts eyes, because not everyone who uses the Internet is tech savvy or would even want such a toolbar installed. However, the results on the top are still sites you would have predicted would be there because of their popularity, so the results have to have some merit.
Why does it matter?
It matters because some agencies disagree with critics and consider Alexa Rank to be significant. Although its accuracy could be flawed, having a better rank might indeed be beneficial for you. One of the way to do is installing the Alexa add-on on your site, apart from the toolbar. This way, people can still rate your site, even if they lack the toolbar.
What is PageRank?
Named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page, PageRank is a part of their overall algorithm and evaluates a site from 0 to 10 based on several factors, but mainly the quantity and quality of the backlinks to the site. Think of it this way – the more backlinks there are to a certain site, the more popular it seems to be on the web, which means that it’s supposed to be high quality. Now, we know that ‘s not always the case, because just like in the real world, sites can be famous for being famous. That’s why Google use different algorithms to evaluate sites.
Purchasing backlinks for a higher PageRank is one of the things people do in order to score higher. This is known as Black Hat SEO and is the reason behind many of Google’s updates in order to combat this exploitation.
Why does it matter?
Just like Alexa, it’s not totally accurate in measuring your site’s popularity on the web, but it follows some basic logic and so the more links there are to your site, and the higher the rank of the sources is, the better.
So which is better?
They both have their pros and cons, so in the end of the day, it depends on what exactly do you need. Are you interested in ad revenue? Different companies have different criteria. For anything else, I don’t think it’s really relevant. One shows you how much people appreciate your site and the other one shows you how many people (with the toolbar) visit it.
