So I know that alexa is the leader in terms of trends and website statistics (externally). I like it, but on one of my websites, Compete has a really low ranking compared to Alexa, I was wondering if its because Compete is a lot more inaccurate. What do you think?
They are both very very inaccurate metrics of little or insignificant value The reason being that they only monitor a small percentage of sites on line
For me alexa is pretty accurate. What i don't like in compete or quantcast is that if your website is new they cannot give you report
There's fair point here as people say they are inaccurate as alexa uses alexa toolbar to monitor traffic and how many people use it? Not many and most of them are webmasters. But if you try to compare traffic between two websites in your niche or just figure out how you perform against them I think Alexa does the job.
To each their own. How they measure the PR is based on their policies of rankings. Personally I don't know which criteria they rank on, but according to their rankings I bet they think they're very accurate. I mean who would want to put up a site and not be as accurate as possible to drive more traffic through it?
Yes its true alexa is a bit biased to web design sites. But webmasters have other interests as well, and they are more frequent surfers. As a result, they are a good "class" of people to measure. It's kind of like polls in US... They poll 1000 people and guess who will win US election (even though there will be 300 million voting not 1000).
IMO, Page Rank is just a general indicator of website popularity and is not a real-time measure. The PR you see may not be the PR of the site today, it could be weeks or months old. So, don't fret over the PR number.
Compete gives some accurate result then the alexa. In alexa blog which have more visitor shows high rank and blog with less visitor show low rank. So i don't trust too much on alexa. It can give 50% idea about your site.