I manage several sites that get 50k+ hits daily, and yet they are still only ranked in the mid 30k. However, another site I manage only gets 12k-15k and they're ranked top 40k. Alexa is nice for judging traffic, but its numbers arn't exact by any means.
In terms of real traffic, Alexa numbers are worthless because they only count visitors that use the Alexa toolbar. Since Alexa isn't mainstream, I daresay that their toolbar users aren't mainstream or typical. However, like PageRank, for some people the Alexa ranking can be seen as an indivcator of "status". Look at it this way - even though Alexa numbers are completly worthless, anyone that with a great ranking on Alexa is going to promote their ranking as an indication that their website is great.
Alexa ranking is pretty accurate. Especially much more since their constant updates, in the past they use to be inaccurate. Anyone who thinks they are inaccurate obviously, don't know the reality of statistics and mathematics.
No Alexa is not accurate. I understand the reality of statistics and mathematics. The problem with the alexa ranking is that it is not a truly random sample. A good portion of webmasters install the alexa toolbar to check their own alexa rank, as well as the alexa rank of competitors. So any alexa ranking data is skewed towards websites favored by the webmaster community. An seo website with the same amount of traffic as a widget store would get a much higher alexa rank. So it is far from being a perfect system. It can still be useful for comparing one website to another. Just don't rely on the numbers to be completely accurate.
Alexa rank is useless. Install Alexa toolbar and visit your site frequently and you'll rank will be increased.
I know the reality of statistics and mathematics. Alexa ranking is worthless. We've compared our sites and Alexa ranks them completely incorrectly. They even got the top three rankings wrong.
I agree with this. Install the toolbar, visit your site everytime and see how the ranking would fall. It is better if you have 2 computers. Install the toolbar on both computers and watch ranking fall like a rock.
It is true. The problem of it is that people who are using the tool bar are not randomly chosen. And it will break all the consumptions in random sampling. Unless there are ways to adjust the bias, Alexa will never be accurate.
try estibot for a specific domain, it checks the alexa and gives a traffic estimation along with the alexa rank but for most IT/Web related sites alexa is not accurate as most Webmasters use alexa toolbar and it gives a wrong estimate (to the high side)