Alexa.com - Check out the Reality

For many years, I've been telling my clients that there is no such significance of Alexa rank. It is just a count, you can not use it as a parameter while measuring marketing efforts on your website. I can increase the alexa rank of a website without getting a single visitor from Google organic search and I mean it.

It only uses its own toolbar to collect information and assign rank to the websites. If a website is opened on a browser where the toolbar is not installed, it'll not affect the website. Below is a snapshot of the mail I sent to one of my client justifying the "no significance" of alexa.com rankings.

And the reality is

But, even after sending such e-mails twice, the client didn't get satisfied and we were finding it difficult to retain him for the next year and he leaves us with no other way out. Now it was really the time to increase his website's alexa ranking and we installed alexa toolbar on different computer systems in our office and started browsing (on same IP) the website 2-3 times a day, everyday. The results were fantastic, it improved alexa by upto 400K in just 20-25 days.

Now, this client is happy and is still paying us just for his increased alexa rank, kidding, I've been doing fantastic SEO work as well for him.

I'm writing this story because today I was browsing alexa.com when one of my team member told me about its new interface. At the same time, I entered its top sites section and navigated to top shopping sites (http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Shopping) globally. Suddenly, India's top online shopping site flipkart.com strikes my mind and I started looking for its position under the list.

I was amazed

I found micromaxinfo.com (Website of an Indian mobile manufacturer) on 64th position but not flipkart.com under top 500. Alexa says that the sites in the category are ordered by the popularity of listing not by the alexa rank. I doubt micromaxinfo.com is much much more popular than flipkart.com, have a look at the below stats extracted from alexa.com itself...

micromaxinfo.com

flipkart.com

You decide which site is more popular, I didn't also found any other Indian online shopping site ahead of micromaxinfo.com.

Is this just a kind of bug into alexa or it states the reality about alexa.com?

Share your thoughts in the comments...