Alexa WAY off?

[mxlabs]

I just installed alexa again and noticed that digitalpoint shows as #950. I never cared about alexa but I assume that this is the worldwide rank? meaning digitalpoint is the 950th most visited domain on the web?
that's very hard to believe... I dont doubt that Shawn has LOTS of traffic on his site but rank 950 is just WAY off the actual rank isnt it?

I assume it is because lots of webmasters visit digitalpoint and webmasters tend to have tools like a google toolbar and alexa installed... but still.

sorry if I posted this to the wrong board, couldn't decide

[digitalpoint]

I would guess it's probably *relatively* accurate. We get more than 1 unique visitor per second, 24/7. If you look at the long-term chart for digitalpoint.com, it's steadily gone up (down??) in relation to real traffic.

[Sorvoja]

#950 would seem to give a good ball park figure.

Webmasterworld is #439
Kvasir.no is #2222
So 950 would be quite in the right ballpark.

[schlottke]

It seems Alexa is accurate though probably 5-10,000 maybe a little deeper.

[Dominic]

I have un-installed the alexa toolbar as often as I have installed it (4 times now).

In the real world (it's a big world out there) 99.999999999% of people don't even know what pagerank is let alone have ever heard of alexa.

The market for alexa is webmasters - so thats what it shows.

We run a viral campaign (people forwarding emails about our street kids gallery and stories about homeless people) and alexa shot up when some people in the forums sent it along for us but alexa went down again and the real page stats kept going up week after week and stabalised and now keeps plodding along in bursts.

So sure - alexa showed what the webmasters were doing but not the general public.

[Sorvoja]

Originally Posted by Dominic

So sure - alexa showed what the webmasters were doing but not the general public.

Digital point is very popular with webmasters :-) My guess is that lots of traffic goes directly to the tools.
The best things in life are for free :=)

[digitalpoint]

Not only that, we are a "real" business as well, and we had a ton of traffic before any tools or anything else related to webmasters or SEO.

[Sorvoja]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

We are a "real" business .

I keep forgetting that. I guess I should take a look at your homepage to find out what you are doing :-)

Added: Wow, 3/4 empoyees are snowboarders! That is really cool :-) My wife and I are both very active snowboarders, we are a part of an informal club of selfemployed professionals and we organize several trips each winter :-)

We often snowboard at these locations:
Norefjell
Hemsedal
Geilo
Kongsberg

[mxlabs]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

I would guess it's probably *relatively* accurate. We get more than 1 unique visitor per second, 24/7. If you look at the long-term chart for digitalpoint.com, it's steadily gone up (down??) in relation to real traffic.

that'd translate into 90k/day?
I just visited the site of an (image) counter service with toplist and one site with 90k per day returned an alexa rank of 8,000.
I didn't even try to find a lower ranked page but you see what I'm talking about. in my book, being one of the top 1000 or one of the top 10,000 sites makes a huge difference.
Alexa would be a nice tool if you could base anything on their stats. Actually I was hoping that their stats would be more reliable in the most-visited regions but this does not seem to be the case obviously.