Accuracy of Alexa

Hi,

How effective is Alexa at guaging a website? My ranking for a size is 3.4 million which is quite poor i think.

What is the relevancy of Alexa for SEO? Is it worth looking at? or just concentrating on SEO.

Thanks

 

its not accurate.. just an estimate... don't rely on it... try some traffic counter like GA

 

It is deathly INACCUARTE, alexa is easily cheatable!

 

I use to see a lot of people asking about it when a site was bought or sold but not as much anymore. It is an inaccurate system and I have yet to figure out the actual formula. I had a site with loads of traffic and my Alexa number was over a million and I had a site with almost no traffic but the Alexa rating as like 120,000. I do not think it has much accuracy at all.

 

I bought a domain that had an Alexa ranking of just under 1,000,000 which is suppose to be great, but I hardly saw any traffic from it. Link popularity is more important then Alexa ranking, but it has to be links from good sources.

 

Incredibly inaccurate and easily gamed. It is only for estimation and a rough figure.

 

The traffic is based on data (pageviews) from people who have the Alexa toolbar installed which is a very, very small portion of internet users. So, essentially, if you and your friends install the toolbar and visit your website a lot you can make your alexa ranking look great. Secondly, anything based on a very small portion of the population is gonna have a margin of error. Instead, focus on the unique visitors and rankings of the website to gain an idea of actual traffic.

 

As a trending tool it can be very useful.

The trick is in understanding how the alexa numbers have related to your own internal numbers.

Notice I said *trending* not *absolute*. Thus, it is not at all useful in evaluating potential purchases of small sites. Of course, on large sites it's all about the paperwork, books and earn outs anyways.

 

Forget Alexa, its heavily biased towards webmaster/search engine related sites.

 

I'd say that most DP members have alexa toolbar installed, so if you wanted a measure of how many DP members were visisting your site then it would be ar easonable estimate. Probably.

But it doesn't really have much authority. Just another goal to aim for.

 

Its just an in-accurate toy for showing off nothing

 

Thanks for the replies.

 

Do not depend much upon Alexa.. it can be easily cracked.

 

Thanks Ab - & all for replies.

 

Although the system is innacurate, I hear that a lot of ad agencies use this ranking to establish your potential income from advertising.

 

IMHO Alexa can be a good tool if you are thinking about buying a site or links on it. While there is very little traffic difference in a site rating 1 million as opposed to 2 million, the lower you get, the more accurate Alexa gets. Once you get to the top 5 or 10 thousand Alexa is quite accurate. You also need to understand the data your seeing. A non webmaster orientated site will have a worse rank than a webmaster site as more visitors to the webmaster orientated site will have the toolbar installed. You also need to look at the historical data of the site, if there is consitent improvement over long periods of time then odds are the site built up on it's own while spikes may show either promotion on sites like digg or even manipulation. As I said, Alexa is a tool, and can be a very useful tool if you know how to read it, but it should never be the only tool you use to determine the value of a site.

I believe Shoemoney once wrote a post about the monetary value of a high (under 10k) Alexa rank.

 

Alexa is only a guide for comparing traffic with your competitor. Some of the tools is not that accurate so don't always rely on it.

 

Alexa rankings depend on website audience. E.g. it seems more webmasters than gamers have Alexa toolbar installed, so webmasters related site will have better Alexa rank comparing to the gamers site with the same traffic...

 

don't waste time, don't worry at all about alexa, no one cares

 

Alexa is pretty useless UNLESS your site is in the top 10,000 sites and it is much harder to fake the value so it has a useful effect.

The topic of the site is the main factor that will decide how 'good' or 'bad' it is for Alexa.

Alexa works out the number of visitors to your site who have teh Alexa toolbar installed.
All other visitors are not known to Alexa, only those who have the toolbar....

So a site on SEO, will get mainly traffic from webmasters who very often have the Alexa toolbar installed, therefore the Alexa rank will be very high (or a low number) if the site is popular.
Just look at DPs Alexa rank for an example of this!

next scenario, your site is about Health Drinks and Exercise...
teh majority of visitors are health fanatics and they dont have the Alexa bar installed....

So even if you get 10,000 unique visitors a day, because hardly any will have the toolbar, your Alexa rank will be low (high number)

Thus meaning that ALexa is only useful if your site is in the top 10,000 as I mentioned before.

I think sites in the top 1000 are hand edited so they are even more accurate .

But Yahoo.com is listed as number one in ALexa

and Google is a few lower iirc.

Judging by the volume of traffic myself and most other webmasters I know get from Yahoo.com, even for position 1 for a popular term, tells me that Yahoo has nowhere near the amount of visitors that Google has

just my 02c

Hope this helps anyone unsure of Alexa , to realise, that it is a worthless number for average sites