How does Alexa know my stats?

[SamOwen]

I was just wondering how Alexa ranks you and keeps track of your stats...

[obenix]

I believe it's through their Alexa toolbar.
Alexa's stats are mainly used as a guide rather than the actual traffic your site is receiving.

[SamOwen]

I kinda figured that but wasn't sure. When I had their toolbar running my site's rank shot up.

[Cristian Mezei]

Alexa counts pages, traffic and aother aspects using the toolbar, indeed.:)

[DomainMagnate]

Alexa uses their 10M toolbar users, but think of it, how many internet user are there? Over a billion probably, so how precise the calculation should be... ;)
And, BTW, for webmaster sites alexa rank is usually higher, because more webmasters are using the toolbar.

[discoverclips]

alexa ranking is not so important, there aren't that many users using the toolbar..

[SaN-DeeP]

I believe it's through their Alexa toolbar.
Alexa's stats are mainly used as a guide rather than the actual traffic your site is receiving.
true, not a perfect tool for gauging any sites traffic.

[frankm]

funny thing is, alexa cannot tell you stats about alexa.com ...

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=alexa.com

but in general: sites with an alexa rank < 1000 are super traffic sites, everything about 1000 is just random (comparing my own traffic stats with alexa's)