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Alexa.com provides following information for two sites at the same time with the same country:

Site A: tarafdari.com (Alexa Link)

1. Global Rank: 8523

2. Country Rank: 157

3. Percentage Of Visitors from that Country: 83.2%

4. Daily Page-views Per Visitor: 13.00

5. Bounce Rate: 13.80%

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Site B: 2iranfilm.com (Alexa Link)

1. Global Rank: 15043

2. Country Rank: 125

3. Percentage Of Visitors from that Country: 83.2%

4. Daily Page-views Per Visitor: 7.09

5. Bounce Rate: 23.70%

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While All metrics of site A look better than site B, the ranking seems totally wrong. Also site A has always been better than site B in global rank. Any explanations for this contradiction?

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    It appears that your sites are doing well! Congratulations!! However, the unfortunate thing is, Alexa cannot accurately determine anything at all. I wrote a piece using simple statistical analysis 101 to prove that Alexa cannot possibly determine not only traffic, but rank. It is just impossible. But they have people buy into this and that is a shame. It does get better for more active sites, but the fundamental problems still remain and accuracy an issue.
    – closetnoc
    May 26, 2015 at 16:21
  • @closetnoc don't they also need to have their sidebar installed on visitor browsers to collect data?
    – dasickle
    May 26, 2015 at 16:38
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    @dasickle Yes. They have a toolbar or a JS bug like Google has. Here are what my thoughts on the matter are: closetnoc.org/?i=definitive-proof-that-alexa-sucks (not perfect, but it gets the point across) - This puts an SA 101 spin on the question of whether Axela has any value. In my opinion, it is not even a poor barometer. I tell people to use SEMRush instead- not perfect but better. As for traffic and rank, they are still guessing. But at least you gt a better picture and they are honest about it.
    – closetnoc
    May 26, 2015 at 17:23
  • @closetnoc very interesting read. RE SEMrush... I noticed that since they upgraded their platform last month it haven't been as accurate. My organic traffic for April went down 33% according to them but my GA shows that my organic channel has been trending up at about 10% to 15% each month for the last 10 months.
    – dasickle
    May 26, 2015 at 17:30
  • @dasickle You may be right about SEMRush. Part of the lower numbers is that they are dividing between desktop and mobile... so you have to add the two?? Still, I like the redesign. It seems more informative. Also, it looks like Spyfu updated a while a ago and I liked what I saw a couple of weeks ago. Another one for consideration. Still Google is the only one who can really tell us what is going on, but I find it difficult to find good trend data (for what I want to know)- numbers yes- but trends, no. Why would I want to export the data and open a spreadsheet? Too much like work!!
    – closetnoc
    May 26, 2015 at 17:51

2 Answers 2

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The answer is rather simple... there's less competition to compete with in your country so naturally you're not competing against websites that have more traffic than yours.

The global rank takes into consideration all the websites and all traffic in the world, then it works out a global rank, the country rank means only the websites in your country, and traffic from that country.

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  • Both websites have got the same percentage of visitors from the same country while site A has a better global rank, naturally it should be ranked better in the country, which is contrarily ranked by Alexa.
    – Manoochehr
    May 26, 2015 at 19:01
  • I'll address that now.
    – Simon Hayter
    May 26, 2015 at 20:39
  • There you go, more obvious what I meant... someone from UK visiting your website using the sidebar will not increase your country rank as country rank will only county traffic from same country. Additionally you shouldn't concern yourselves with Alexa too much, its HUGELY! unreliable because of the fact people need the toolbar. Also, I do not advise using any Alexa probing JavaScript either, because technically that's spyware.
    – Simon Hayter
    May 26, 2015 at 20:42
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That's simply a bug in Alexa ranking which may have happened in short period of time. While both site A and site B have same percentage of visitors from a specific country, the site with better Global Rank would have also better Local Rank.

Data we have: Site A (GlobalRank: 8523) has more visitors than site B (GlobalRank: 15043).

Let's suppose Site A has 60.000 visitors per day. In this case site B must have less visitors because of worse Global Rank. My hypothesis is that site B has 40.000 visitors per day.

Site A Visitors: 83.2% of site A visitors (60.000) are from Iran, so hypothetically it has 49.920 visitors from Iran.

Site B Visitors: 83.2% of site B visitors (40.000 users) are from Iran, so hypothetically it has 33.280 visitors from Iran.

Conclusion: Site A must have better Local Rank than Site B. After posting a ticket for Alexa, the ranking was corrected.

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