Alexa and Compete ranking are perhaps arguably, the most widely recognized website ranking systems especially for those living not in the US. Often, they’re referred to when doing traffic comparison. But how accurate is their system, when it comes to ranking of websites outside of the US or for non-English websites?

My 99th sense is telling me that something is not really accurate. I sometimes noticed that popular non-English websites/blogs have low ranks in Alexa and Compete (especially) compared to websites or blogs in the US. Before that, this is purely my personal observation without having backed up with any statistic/number. So if you feel that I’m wrong, feel free to leave your comment.

So let’s see some comparison. I’m using Utusan Online (online daily news) and HarakahDaily (political daily news) VS John Chow (renown blogger). Do you notice how different their ranking is?

Harakah Daily - Ranked 6k in Alexa, but none in compete (actually there are merely 500 people if you run it on Compete website.

Utusan Online - Ranked 2.9K in Alexa, but merely K readers in Compete.

JohnChow - Ranked 27K in Alexa, but ranked 16 K in compete

What do you think? Which one is accurate? It sounds like Alexa ranks makes more sense here.

1. How the traffic is estimated

The comparison is not complete without understanding how the traffic is estimated. The table below taken from Compete website should provide you a clearer view.

a) User Sampling

Compete

Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users

The main reason why US with english websites rank better. US is the undisputed power on Internet, and as we all know, major websites reside in US. The internet penetration is among the highest as well as in the world. So when it comes to tracking their daily browsing activities, you can clearly guess, which website they’re going to browse. Be it Yahoo, Google, MS, Facebook, MySpace they’ll reside in the US.

Can you imagine them reading Harakah Daily or Utusan Online on daily basis. Absolutely not. What the heck would they want to read news of other countries, not my own business. Ok, they may visit, but it is by incident whether from search engines or they stumbled upon somewhere.

Alexa - Alexa does not disclose any information about this. So it is unknown of how many samples are used, from which country or region it was selected and etc. But based on the sample traffic estimation provided above, it seems like Alexa is tracking the browsing activities from all over the world.

b) Clickstream -What is clickstream?

A virtual trail that a user leaves behind while surfing the Internet. A clickstream is a record of a user’s activity on the Internet, including every Web site and every page of every Web site that the user visits, how long the user was on a page or site, in what order the pages were visited, any newsgroups that the user participates in and even the e-mail addresses of mail that the user sends and receives. Both ISPs and individual Web sites are capable of tracking a user’s clickstream. Clickstream data is becoming increasingly valuable to Internet marketers and advertisers.

Toolbar - Both Compete and Alexa has their own toolbars. Before this, Alexa has been using Alexa toolbar which many said, the main resource is estimating the traffic on certain websites, before this method was changed earlier this year. They might still be using it though, plus other sources of data. Compete Toolbar has similar function here, even though it is not as popular as Alexa and rarely becomes benchmark to estimate the traffic. I don’t see much different of my Compete rank before and after installing Compete Toolbar. Furthermore, Compete rank is not updated as often as Alexa rank.

US as the major internet power, has more Internet users than any other countries have. And since they’re the pioneer, their Internet users who’re familiar enough, should have known more the existence of such tools. So having this toolbar installed on their web browser, which will track their browser activities which definitely are centered around their country, US. Again, English+US websites have the advantage when it comes to this. Taking online daily news website as an example, would US folks read Utusan Malaysia or Harakah Daily or vice versa?

ASP & ISP - Clickstream data also gathered from from ISP (internet service provider), ASP (application service provider). ISP especially has a complete log of browsing activities for each of its customers. By utilising the data that ISP has, traffic estimation is more accurate, but it’s not possible to estimate all data.

Script/Javascript - Probably the most accurate way not only to estimate the traffic, but in fact to calculate the number of traffic itself. Rarely practised, and who’d want to overload websites with scripts isn’t it? It is mostly used by web tracking websites such as Google Analytic and Statcounter. Having script installed on each of page definitely provides more. Alexa has Alexa Rank widget which is said to help increase your ranking.

That’s it, the factor that directly hits the traffic estimation, but there are many more external factors that have their roles on this.

2. Non-English content

English is the most used language in Internet as well as the language that has the most content. Your website is written in your mother tongue which is not wrong (in fact is highly recommended since not all are English-fluent). But since some of the methods of estimating the traffic is focused mainly on the US internet users, which speak and read English, logically they’ll go after English websites before the other non-english websites with help of online translator. But not all US folks speak and read English, they have Africans, Hispanics, Asians and etc, but the portion is small.

3. Lack of interest/knowledge of these ranks

Internet is not yet matured in developing countries (as well as some developed countries). The usage is mostly for emails, researches, fun or socializing purpose far from monetizing it. The internet business/entrepreneurship is not yet booming as well as the awareness of internet business itself. And even if there is internet entrepreneuship, the importance of having good rank such as Pagerank, Alexa or Compete is not really being taken care of.

It’ll be either lack of interest or lack of knowledge and expertise to get this done. Even though the accuracy of this rank is highly doubtful especially for non-english and non-US websites, but some publishers are giving a considerably amount of weight to this rank before making any advertisement offer.

Download Alexa Toolbar, Compete Toolbar and Alexa Widget

Domain name and extention .com

.com might be the most registered domain extention on the internet and among the earlierst domain extention ever exist. What is the relation of domain extention with this rank? On the countries which pioneer the internet and WWW, their citizen has the opportunity to register desired domain name earlier than any other countries, thus most single verbs or nouns domain names (especially .com) have already been owned by them.

Most of these websites have been in business earlier than anyone else, which gives them a slight advantage in terms of marketing strategy and SEO. The age of domain is given weight by search ranking when it comes to rank for certain keywords. By having an SEO friendly website, your website contents will appear on top of the search engine result, and you’ll enjoy high number of visits from users. This is then translated to high traffic and thus positively affecting your ranking.

Other than that, on the case of new users who’re looking for something without using search engines, they tend to type the domain name plus .com extention even though the actual website they’re looking at has different domain extension.

SEO

I touch on the basics of the importance of SEO in my point of view above. The analogy of SEO is like….. a house without address or postal address. Or imagine you building a house in a newly found no-name land. I hope I make it right. Who in the earth can find your house? Accidentally yes perhaps. Or perhaps after asking for direction many times. So no matter how ‘cool’ your house is, or how expensive your furniture is, without address, it’s worthless. No one can find it. Same goes to websites.

Everything starts from zero including building websites. While you’re working hard to get your website up and running, SEO plays an important role to attract traffics. You can overtake who’s who in the market you’re jumping into, no matter how long they’re in the business, how big they are, as long as your website arms with the right SEO package. Remember, SEO enhances your credibility and ranks you well in the eye of peers and competitors.

Content and creativity

Content + creativity is something that is within everyone’s control, but possibly the hardest to achieve. The biggest obstacle is human capital and expertise needed to built world class system or appllication, which is something that developing countries (such as Malaysia) is lacking off. Our IT, especially Internet related is too new. Our IT is moving into other directions especially BPO as we witnessed in our own mini Silicon Valley, Cyberjaya Quality content will gain traffic, thus ranks high on the search engine and resulting a better traffic estimation.

It’s not an overnight job, absolutely. But having to identify what we’re lacking of can cover ourself now and in the future, and save ourselves from spending our time and effort meaningless. It’s not as simple as doing very good in 1 area will bring us up, but it works like a package where you must patch all holes before you can move further.

We have a lot of things to do, but being able to prioritize your stuffs according to the urgency will reward you nicely sooner or later.