It’s official: Alexa.com has been shut down.
Today, I had a casual chat with our web developer Ben about rankings, SEO, green coding, the carbon footprint of our website….light talk in between projects. And Ben asked me to check the Alexa rank of our website. Well, wasn’t I surprised when I went to Alexa.com and found a sad little note advising that she has gone. Disappeared in the ether of nothingness. Bye-bye Alexa.
Who is Alexa.com?
The popular website, which has been operated by Amazon for the past 25 years, was best known for its global traffic and ranking indexes, which tracked various stats for more than 30 million websites. Tracking was accomplished via a combination of allied browser extensions and an installable Alexa script that site admins could add to their pages to support tracking. Now that Alexa is gone, and if you’re curious about how popular your website was in the past, you’ll just have to rely on your memories (or ask someone who was around back then).
Why did we use Alexa.com?
Alexa.com was a well-known tool for keeping track of a particular site’s performance long before search engine rankings became prevalent. Its catalog of services included options for viewing factors like bounce rates, duration of average visits to a given site, comparisons of the relative popularity of two or more tracked sites, and more. Alexa’s data was gathered through the use of a toolbar that users installed on their web browser, which then tracked their web activity and sent the information back to Alexa. This information was then used to compile various reports and rankings. While Alexa’s data was never 100% accurate, it was generally considered to be a good indicator of a site’s relative popularity. Any website owner who wanted to get an idea of how their site was performing would do well to give Alexa a try.
Why did Alexa.com shut down?
While Amazon has not provided an official reason for its decision to shut down the Alexa.com service, the company has likely shifted its priorities away from the site and towards SEO considerations and search engine rankings. This plain statement leaves a lot of room for speculation. Could it be that Amazon just wanted to free up the name? Was the competition such as SEMRush or ScreamingFrog better in monetising their userbase?
Well, we will never know. But for today, we take a moment to say goodbye to a good old friend who accompanied us for a quarter of a century. Alexa, this is the parrots waving goodbye to you…
What do you think? Will you miss Alexa.com? Let us know in the comments!