In simple terms, Alexa Traffic Rank is a rough measure of a website's popularity, compared with all the others out there on the internet, taking into account both the number of visitors and the number of pages viewed on each visit. Alexa collects traffic data on a daily basis from millions of users who have the Alexa toolbar installed, and also from other sources, and then uses a complex mathematical formula on three months' worth of data to arrive at the ranking for each site.
This can be interpreted as the website's position in a giant league table based both on visitor numbers and on the number of pages viewed by each visitor. The 'most popular' site is given a ranking of 1, the second 'most popular' a ranking of 2, and so on down to the millions of sites that receive relatively few visitors.
How many websites are there altogether?
Probably nobody knows even roughly how many websites there are at the present moment. In February 2007 the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 (or nearly 110 million) distinct sites, and the odds are that there are considerably more than that by now.
What this means is that, even if we accept the comparatively conservative estimate of 110 million, a site with an Alexa Traffic Rank of less than 1,100,000 is within the top 1% of all websites, based on its traffic ranking according to Alexa.
Of course, up till now we have been discussing worldwide rankings; a website may be particularly popular in certain countries, and less popular in others. As the figures at the bottom of this page show, our site, altered-art.net, is most popular in a number of countries that include the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and is able to achieve a traffic ranking in these countries considerably higher than its overall worldwide ranking.
