So you’re concerned that your website isn’t in Alexa‘s database. The followup question should be, how important is having an Alexa traffic rank anyway?
It’s a common question, and no doubt countless website owners from all over the world (wide web) fret and worry about their Alexa traffic rankings.
While your Alexa rank IMO isn’t super important for your SERP and SEO in general, having a rank gives you (the website owner) a little bit of visibility and insight into your standing and place on the Internets. As any website owner knows, any kind of available metrics or stats helps give you an idea of how your website it doing. Now a low Alexa rank doesn’t necessarily mean that your website is doing poorly. For example, you may have a low Alexa score but you generate a lot of income through advertising or affiliate sales. The Alexa numbers to me, act as a relative guideline and only tell a fraction of the whole story.
What if your website doesn’t appear on Alexa?
If your website doesn’t show up on Alexa at all, the best thing you can do is wait. Yes, that is the super most boring answer ever, but that’s pretty much it.
Case in point: Over the past year, I had registered 2 domains. One of them, which never really got off the ground (plus I ran out of time to work on it), appeared on Alexa almost immediately. I found this kind of perplexing since since this website (yes, the one you are on right now) still didn’t appear on Alexa even though it had been generating decent traffic for a good 2 months and the domain was registered in August of 2015. No doubt, I started to become a little obsessed with checking regularly to see if we were ranking, but no. Nothing. Nada.
But then last week, the day finally came when we did appear on Alexa with an approximate traffic rank of 15,000,000(!). In fact, some quick calculations revealed that we appeared a full 6 months after we had registered the domain name. Hmm, so did the six month rule of waiting come into play? My bet is that it did.
So what’s up with my low traffic website that appeared on Alexa almost immediately after I bought the domain? Well, after some research and checking out the Wayback Machine, it turns out that the domain in particular had already been registered in the past, so I effectively bought an old domain without realizing it, and Alexa in turn already had that domain in its database.
Mystery solved.
How you rank may change over time
If I’m not mistaken, I believe that new websites used to appear on Alexa much quicker in the olden days of the Internet, or at least faster than they do today. And with all that said, it’s just another metric which is not going to make or break a website. Sure, it’s cool to move up the ranks in popularity and maybe you use the (very approximate) numbers for bragging rights or even as a conversation starter. But if we’re all honest with ourselves we can probably admit that website statistics are great to look at when you want to procrastinate instead of writing great content. So, take those stats with a grain of salt and keep writing!