Recently, some webmasters who have some basic SEO pointed out that Alexa ranks mean less or even nothing if your site does not have real visitors. Some say Alexa is simply incorrect (at least for Vietnam) and not a good standard for website traffic tracking and measuring. You yourself can see this by just taking a look at Alexa top 100 of Vietnam: there are many foreign strangle sites in the list (that we’ve never known before).

Also, SEO-based webmasters suggest a free tool from Google, Analytics, for more accurate figures, regardless of updates/ improvements of Alexa ranking algorithms in April 2008.

However, Vietnam advertisers are too familiar with Alexa and they still strongly believe in its figures. Maybe webmasters need time to persuade advertisers not to completely rely on Alexa when evaluating a website’s traffic.

Zing, a brand new branch of Vinagame (who is the most successful investor in Vietnam MMORPG with Vo Lam Truyen Ky) has been working hard for more than 1 year to become the no.1 local website. In a short time, they’ve launched big sites like Yobanbe.zing.vn, Mp3.zing.vn, Chat.zing.vn (now redirects to City.zing.vn), Movie.zing.vn, Star.zing.vn, News.zing.vn, etc. About diversity and rate of development, no other company can compare with Vinagame within the last 12 months. In July 17, they announced that Zing had become the no.1 site in Vietnam. According to experts, it was VietBao.vn (a well-optimized news site with huge traffic) helping Zing by redirecting traffic to News.zing.vn for about 1 week. At that time, VietBao was banned for publishing news without any legal license from the state (now alive though).

Of course this news made FPT unpleased. Their well-known website VNExpress.net has been at the leading position for years (even this site used to rank in top 100 worldwide). They realised that subdomains could help and one of the visible methods they carried out was to group other existing sites under the main domain VNExpress.net such as Phimanh.vnexpress.net, Ngoisao.vnexpress.net, Gamethu.vnexpress.net, etc. Last week they gained what they want: return to the first position for Vietnam websites.

This Alexa race is interesting. And who will win?

Vietnam internet users! Remember Content is King, don’t you?