it is going to get harder to rank as the forums proliferate the web. DP is well rated, it also has a large core of regular users as there are products that people come back to use. A standard information or interest website without a forum can never compete with that over a sustained period. Alexa certainly is not crap, but it depends how you interpret the results. I happen to quite like it, as it only takes a second to check, the problem is i can see absolutely no other use for alexa !!
My slower sites update weekly to every other week. My bigger sites update almost daily to daily. I think they scale their updates or something. SB
Actually it is. Biased sample uncertain sample characteristics no evidence that the surfing habits of that sample is representative of any meaningful population at all no evidence that the toolbar is even always active for people who do use it unknown if the toolbar users turn it off when they visit certain sites or types of sites etc. etc. In a nutshell, sampling bias and lack of information about the sample its based on and its habits make it completely meaningless and useless as a measure of anything having to do with ranking websites. All you can say about Alexa numbers is that it reflects something about the unique sample of web surfers who have the toolbar installed and do not turn it off.
Certainly not scientific. What is that quote about Anthropology? The act of observing something changes it? The variety of people's tastes, the number of directories and search engines, toolbars, time spent on various tasks, etc. makes what they are trying to do impossible. I don't think there is any way to have a truly representative sample on the web. But at the same time, I almost always find something interesting on the Movers and Shakers list, and often at the bottom end of the Top 500. So I go check out where I and some close competitors rank. I put the toolbar on and hope to improve, maybe getting some freebie links out of the feed. Not worthless, but nothing to depend on for accuracy. The Traffic Rank updated a few days ago. I am wondering if there is a new period to it, or if there are other changes made to the system that caused them to freeze (or perhaps they chose to) for awhile. Maybe they were hoping for a reaction like Google got when toolbar PR went gray for a bit?