With Alexa.com APIs retiring on December 15, what does the future hold?
However, the last date for anybody to download the data through the service APIs (Application Programming Interface) is December 15 this year, after which the service APIs would be
Hyderabad: After being around for over 25 years, Amazon has decided to drop the curtains on Alexa Internet — a service that has provided web traffic analysis over the past two-and-a-half decades — on May 1, this year. However, the last date for anybody to download the data through the service APIs (Application Programming Interface) is December 15 this year, after which the service APIs would be decommissioned.
As per the Question and Answers column in the website, December 15 will be the last day one can obtain the data via the API and post that all the data will be removed. The users would receive “410 GONE” error upon requesting the data after the marked date.
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In an earlier announcement post, the Alexa.com team said the company stopped offering new subscriptions on December 8, 2021. “Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more,” the post read.
Alexa was founded in 1996 and bought by Amazon in 1999 — 15 years before the shopping giant revealed its digital assistant of the same name. It is best known for Alexa Rank, a ranking of the world’s most popular websites, with this information frequently referenced in news coverage and public resources like Wikipedia.
What exactly is Alexa Rank?
Alexa Rank is a ‘global ranking system’ that lists out millions of websites ever created in the internet space in order of their popularity. The ranking was calculated by Alexa.com by looking at a combination of factors – the estimated average daily unique visitors over a three-month span, number of pageviews for a given site, how good and relevant the content on the website is, and how strong the internal links within the site are, among many other things.
Alexa rank was one way of measuring where a website stands in comparison with competitors and/or other websites in the same domain or related domains. By looking at the combined figures of web traffic and site’s engagement with its users over a three-month period, an Alexa Rank between 1 and 100,000 is assigned to the site. And, the lower the website’s Alexa rank, the more popular the website is perceived to be. So, an Alexa Rank under 30,000 would mean the website is among the top and the best in terms of its popularity.
Why was Alexa Rank significant?
Alexa.com’s rankings have been given the importance of establishing traffic metrics in many online businesses and have remained the most familiar name in the web-ranking world. It was one of the most helpful tools, before the advent of Google Analytics, for an SEO specialist to determine the popularity of their website. Based on the Alexa Rank, the SEO optimising experts would take necessary steps to increase their site’s visibility and, thereby, ranking.
With the service ending, many people dependent on its rankings are looking at other alternative services such as SimilarWeb, Tranco, and ComScore. Google Analytics is also considered to be one of the best options available currently to understand the overall picture of metrics of a given website.