Google PR and Alexa Rank Corelation
Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank are seen as two separate measures of your website success. Basically, the PageRank determines the number and quality of sites linking back to you, while the Traffic Rank measures the amount of traffic your website receives. But the question that many are concerned about is, “Is there a correlation between the two?”
Let us use two websites as our example: CSS Zen Garden and Mail.ru. The first site focus on CSS programming, it has a PR of 8 and a traffic rank of 13,000+. Meanwhile, the Mail.ru site is an incredibly popular portal for Russians. It has a PR of 6 but it ranked 23rd in Alexa. Can traffic affect the popularity of your links?
Although Mail.ru is a very famous portal, the CSS Zen Garden was given a higher PR because it has more quality links. Take a closer look at the CSS Zen Garden site; because it is geared toward a specific niche, the niche is more likely to provide direct links. The Mail.ru site, while being more popular, is geared towards users who want to get free videos, email, news, chat, etc. so they are less likely to give links.
The difference between the real popularity of the portal and the number of relevant links pointing to it needs statistical data to prove the correlation. It would be an “abnormal” situation if a site that has millions of visitors has a PR of 0. Interest in this correlation may be stemmed from Google’s decision to drop major blog’s PR by 2. By looking at how Alexa ranks websites, you will know what it is all about.
Google PR
The range of PR can be from PR0 to PR10. Google explains that “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web”. Basically, Google interprets the site’s link structure to determine PR. More relevant votes come from major websites.
Alexa Traffic Rank
It can range from no rank – 10,000,000, 1,000,000, etc.
Alexa computes the ranking by looking at the usage of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sifted, counted, and computed until the traffic rankings show. The process is quite complex but it generally determines your rankings based on traffic count.
Conclusion
Both metrics have its faults. PR, for example is dependent on Google’s decisions while the Alexa traffic rank is giving you the “whole” picture based on people that use its toolbars only. But there is definitely a strong relationship between the two simply because there is a great statistical chance that a percentage of visitors will link to a website they know about. Likewise, the number of links will increase your traffic count and increase your Alexa traffic ranking.
Tags: alexa, google, Search Engine Optimization