But why settle for a "vague idea", when you can get precise visitor numbers from places like StatCounter or Google Analytics?
Alexa is the only tool we have to compare our site to other sites, that is why we like it. For accuracy you use analytics, for comparisons you use Alexa.
if you were to ask me alexa is not a useless tools, i used it as one of the many factors in looking for a link trades and submissions. even if it is not accurate it is still the only tools you need to used in order to know the amount of traffic or the stability of a certain site. for example if i have a car insurance site with a pr 0 and an alexa of 29,000 and your site has a pr 0 and an alexa of 3,000,000 do you think you would consider to trade links with me? i mean even doe we know that alexa is not accurate we still know that 29,000 alexa ranking still has a higher traffic than 3,000,000 alexa rankings we still used this tool as a reference.
Well uttoransen Yaar...See alexa calculate rank using installed toolbars on a pc. It's only accurate to some extent on sites in the top 10,000 the rest of the results are(can be) extrapolated from the few people who have the alexa toolbar that visit the site.... You can have a poll on it buddy... I wish if it doesn't get manipulated...its indeed can be a great..tool..Anyway thanks for the link..... http://www.yfs1.com/2006/manipulating-alexa-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html
I agree that Alexa is near useless, but it does give you a general idea I have a site that ranks 1 to 3 for most of my target keywords and phrases (on Google) yet my Alexa rank is only 418,946
The problem with Alexa is that it's results are skewed toward a certain demographic of users. That demographic would be the SEOs markerters and tech heads and bloggers who have the toolbar installed in order to monitor their Alexa rank or that of their clients. It's a sad fact that many services, such as PayPerPost type services for bloggers use your Alexa rank as a factor when determining the value of payouts to bloggers. In this sense it creates very skewed results which you cannot take as being representative of the entire online community but at least represents the above demographic.
There are crap scripts out there which if run in your toolbar can put u on top ranked sites of alexa, and they seems to have done nothing about it So you know how much to trust it
PageRank is useless too. But it's a tool to gauge general trends. It's not absolute, it's relative - and easy to skew results. But Alexa and PageRank is the best we have right now unfortunately.
Well, Alexa in the second thought only give us an inaccurate result of traffic regards with web site competitor while page rank show how quality is our website every tool has a purpose and not useless.