What is Alexa rank?
Alexa collects statistics about visits by internet users to websites through the Alexa Toolbar. Based on the collected data, Alexa computes site ranking. By examining the Alexa rank of a site, you can get a rough idea of how popular the site is. Many argue that Alexa rank is misleading but it has its uses.
The Alexa rank script
You can find out the Alexa rank for any site by using this page. However, if you want to programatically get the Alexa rank, you can do it using this script.
Get the Alexa rank script
Using the script
After downloading the script, give it execute permission by doing this. You will need to have Python installed.
chmod +x get_alexa_rank.py$ ./get_alexa_rank.py google.com popularity rank = 2 reach_rank = 1 $ ./get_alexa_rank.py wikipedia.com popularity rank = 7 reach_rank = 6 $ ./get_alexa_rank.py blog.prashanthellina.com popularity rank = 557287 reach_rank = 482289 $ ./get_alexa_rank.py www.inexistantsite.com popularity rank = -1 reach_rank = -1
How does the script work?
If you make a http request for the following url,
http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=$URL
after replacing $URL with the url of the site for which you need the Alexa rank, the following XML response is sent out. I tried with “http://blog.prashanthellina.com”.
<ALEXA VER="0.9" URL="blog.prashanthellina.com/" HOME="0" AID="="> <RLS PREFIX="http://" more="0"> </RLS> <SD TITLE="A" FLAGS=""> <POPULARITY URL="prashanthellina.com/" TEXT="557287"/> <RANK DELTA="+70225"/> <REACH RANK="482289"/> </SD> </ALEXA>
The script parses the XML response and extracts POPULARITY/@TEXT and REACH/@RANK.
If you are looking for a PHP script for doing the same, check this out.
Tags: alexa, alexa rank, programmatically, python, script, xml















Nate Nead wrote,
it seems to me that the Alexa rank has nothing to do with search engine optimization, because there are a lot of sites with a worse page rank that have higher spots in the engines for our keywords, is this not true?
Link | July 16th, 2008 at 3:42 am
prashanthellina wrote,
That may be true. Alexa rank measures traffic to a site (as in number of visitors). Page rank is a measure of page “popularity” on the web. Both these measure different aspects of a page/site. Since Alexa rank does not imply higher PR, it may not be a factor in SEO.
Link | July 17th, 2008 at 8:56 pm