What is the story with Alexa?

[midlandi]

What is the story with Alexa?

Alexa's rankings are generally considered to be inaccurate at best. Their rankings depend on a user having their toolbar or their spyware installed in order to track their surfing habits. Plus their software is limited to the Windows operating system further limiting the reach of their software and accuracy of their results.

With the possible exceptions of selling/buying a website and applying to and ad service, Alexa serves no useful purpose and important decisions should not be made based on its results.

If you want to improve your ranking in Alexa just install the toolbar into your browser. Be sure to visit your site daily. This will cause your site to jump in the rankings after a few weeks. Get your friends to do it, too, and you can make a significant impact on your rankings.

 

[temi]

You are right about alexa being a completely useless tool one should base important decision but, where is not been "rigged" it serves as a basic yardstick for seeing how busy a site is, like you said, this can easily be manipulated.

 

[SkinnerW]

The only reason why Alexa is being used by many webmasters - it's the only tool to get an idea about the traffic on another website.

To use any other statistics tool - you must prove that you are the website owner...

 

[Geoserv]

But even using it to see the traffic of another website isn't accurate information.

If the site you want to see the traffic for doesn't have visitors who use the toolbar then their traffic ranking may not be an accurate reflection of their traffic.

Geoserv

 

[RiverWire]

Most of the time you can only get a gist of the rankings in the top 100,000 BUT if you look most of them are directory's and webmaster related sites.

Ive seen a site that was hitting 5000 - 10,000 uniques a day and was ranking at around 1.5 million mark and then a site that gets around 50 visitors aday sitting at around the 400,000 mark !! If your site has nothing to do with webmaster stuff like toys or something and you cant really judge the traffic with out the stats.

I saw a bloke moaning the other day on Sitepoint market place because someone claimed they we getting so many uniques a day but the alexa rank was 3 mil or something like that, even though the seller had the proof of traffic, referrals and revenue etc this guy was still accusing him of fixing the traffic etc ! Grrr gets on my tits lol

 

[Mars Guitars]

... Plus their software is limited to the Windows operating system further limiting the reach of their software and accuracy of their results.

While I'm no great fan of Alexa, it is possible to use their Firefox add-in on a Mac.

I think Alexa is probably more use to the 'big boys' than those lower down the rankings.

 

[Meti]

I've never be a fan of Alexa, I cannot even see a point why some of the users even consider adding alexa rankings on their web directories', thinking it comes to good use.

First of all, Alexa is a inaccurate and shouldn't ever be considered as an valid traffic source. If it was accurate, my older web directory gained around 2-3k uniques a month and my previous computer forum earned about 10k as far as I remember.

My web directory had an Alexa rank of 250-300k and my computer forum was somewhere between 700-800k, very accurate isin't it?

- Meti

 

[Stephanie]

I've never be a fan of Alexa, I cannot even see a point why some of the users even consider adding alexa rankings on their web directories', thinking it comes to good use.

First of all, Alexa is a inaccurate and shouldn't ever be considered as an valid traffic source. If it was accurate, my older web directory gained around 2-3k uniques a month and my previous computer forum earned about 10k as far as I remember.

My web directory had an Alexa rank of 250-300k and my computer forum was somewhere between 700-800k, very accurate isin't it?

- Meti

Wow that is a big difference Meti - thanks for sharing!

 

[Mars Guitars]

My Alexa went from 3,500,000 to 700,000 over 3months... which is a nice feeling, but pretty meaningless!

 

[Meti]

My Alexa went from 3,500,000 to 700,000 over 3months... which is a nice feeling, but pretty meaningless!

It seems you've attracted lots of webmasters (with alexa toolbar installed), good achivement any way Which niche?

- Meti

 

[RiverWire]

Another way to improve your alexa is to intall their banner, if you look right at the bottom of my site you'll see it

Tottenham Hotspur Forum - Spurs Site - Home

this has pushed my site to something like 290,000 from the deep millions in about 6 months, until i installed that bar my alexa rank never used to move but it gets higher every couple of weeks now.