PageRank and Alexa Rank

Google PageRank: For those who don't know what PageRank was for a website, it was a value assigned by Google to each site based on its importance. The higher the PageRank, the better the site would be viewed by Google and the higher it would appear in search results.

PageRank was supposedly earned with each page that linked to your website. For example, if you had a good number of sites linking to your web, it was a good sign that your PageRank would increase in the next update. However, it could also decrease if the sites linking to you were penalized by Google. I say supposedly because I know sites with no inbound links that have a PageRank of 3.

Many webmasters didn’t want to exchange links with sites that had a lower PageRank than theirs, but others said that PageRank wasn’t important and preferred to focus on Alexa Rank. In reality, no one knew Google's secret to measuring a website's PageRank.

PageRank ranged from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning the site wasn’t very important and 10 meaning the site was the most important. A site with PageRank 4 was already considered important and would likely appear on the first page of search results. Sometimes, the word "unranked" would appear, meaning the site was too new and hadn't appeared in the ranking yet.

Unlike Alexa, PageRank was not a unique number. There could be millions of sites with the same PageRank, and it measured individual pages, not entire sites like Alexa. For example, if you visited ociosotropical.com/ocio and it had a PageRank of 5, that was only for that specific page. If you clicked on one of its links, like "Productos" or "Ranking," those would have a different PageRank from the homepage because PageRank was measured per page.

PageRank would appear in search engines by installing one of their extensions or plugins. As soon as you entered the site, the number would appear at the bottom or somewhere else, depending on the plugin.

Google shut down PageRank to the public on March 7, 2016, but they still use it internally.

Alexa: Alexa for a site was measured by the number of visits it received, and unlike PageRank, it was a unique number and had no limit. Currently, there are about 65 million sites on the internet. If you had just created a site, your Alexa ranking would likely be around 50,000,000 (50 million). This number would decrease over time as more people visited the site.

Alexa measured entire sites, regardless of which page you were on. It would give the same number as long as you stayed on the same domain. For example, ociosotropical.com, ociosotropical.com/ocio, and ociosotropical.com/productos would all have the same Alexa number.

If your Alexa ranking was 5,000, it meant that your site was better than millions of sites, but at the same time, it was worse than 4,999 sites that Alexa considered to have more visits or be better than yours. As mentioned earlier, the top ranking on Alexa was for Google, with a ranking of 1, meaning it was the most visited site on the planet, followed by YouTube at 2, Facebook at 3, Yahoo at 4, and so on. As mentioned, no site had the same number in Alexa's ranking, and many considered it more important than PageRank.

Amazon shut down Alexa on May 1, 2022.

Conclusion: The higher the PageRank, the better, and the lower the Alexa ranking, the better.