It's based solely on visits to various sites by the three remaining people in the world, all webmasters, who have the Alexa toolbar installed. The data it collects is hopelessly flawed and meaningless. Even Alexa admits this. It tells you nothing useful about your site at all. See http://www.v7n.com/alexa.php for more.
Ok. I was wondering since a lot of people here are listing their Alexa ranking like it means something or is a big deal.
I know. I think that's what people fall back to when they don't have much else to point to as an endoresement of the site. Sort of like buying an old beater from a used car salesman who tries to distract you from the rust, the clunking noises in the transmission, and the blue smoke pouring out of the tailpipe by saying, "She's fully loaded - air, power steering, power brakes, power windows, heated seats, and AM radio"...
If you want to look at alexa results you can download the toolbar. One thing that it can be useful for is comparing traffic between your site and a site that is targeted towards the same audience. If you do a relative comparison in this case using alexa and then look at your sites traffic stats, you can get a rough idea of how much traffic the other guy is getting. It really only has a chance of being accurate if the sites are targeted towards the same audience. Because alexa is downloaded only by certain types of people, this creates problems when comparing two sites with totally different audiences. For example, an SEO forum will register far more traffic with alexa than a women's shopping site. But it doesnt mean that the seo forum gets more total visitors.
If you are going to use Alexa rankings for any purpose other then entertaintment, I would say you are wasting your time. The numbers are so scewed and more importantly so easily munipulated. I honestly wouldn't waste any of your precious webmaster time looking over or learning about it.
My thoughts exactly, token20. Try this experiment, Star2323. Install the Alexa toolbar. Then visit one of your own pages with the toolbar active. Refresh the page repeatedly. watch your Alexa numbers change before your very eyes. We tried this on one of the forums about a year ago.
If you just want to see the ranking, etc. go to Alexa and input your full url - http:// and all. If you wish to Get the Alexa Toolbar, here is a link. The rank information on the toolbar is based on a three-month average. You can see more current data at Alexa.
I think Alexa ratings are harder to manipulate than people think - check out www.alexatest.com for my findings to date. As I've mentioned in other threads about Alexa...if anyone thinks they can manipulate the Alexa rating "easily" go for it. So far, no one's taken me up on the offer
Thanks. Seems to me that Alexa has become harder to manipulate in the last year. I've done quite a bit to the Alexa test site and haven't really seen it move much since the start of Nov. Haven't even cracked the 100K mark... Like I said, anyone who thinks manipulating the Alexa rank is still "easy", go for it. Off topic - whatever happened to Dodger by the way? Here one day, gone the next.
I agree - I have been hitting GFC's alexa test site for a couple weeks now with IE and Alexa Toolbar. Not much change from what I can see...
I didn't know that - thanks for your help. FYI, and I'll post this to the actual site later, I've been: Hitting the site a few times with the toolbar installed. Have a few friends that are doing the same. Used Alexa boost with 10K proxies for 2 weeks The results speak for themselves at this point.... token20, how would one "easily" manipulate an Alexa ranking to any significant degree?
Yeap - I thought this would be an interesting experiment, so I have been clicking in now and again... I am surprised how difficult it seems to game Alexa now - perhaps they changed in the past year? Anyone willing to take on the challenge and kick AlexaTest.com into the 5000 ranking?