Over the last several months, I've watched as my site ranking went from around a 4 million to 2 million and last week it dipped under the 1 million mark. Besides showing that my site is getting more traffic, is this ranking useful for anything else? Could this be a benefit when trying to get a site advertiser? Thanks for any help you can offer.
Alexa is useful if you want to get an idea of how much traffic a site gets. It's not exact by any means - You could be Alexa 500,000 and get LESS traffic than the guy at Alexa 600,000. When I need to know how much traffic a site gets - say I'm looking to buy it or maybe link exchange or whatever - I always look for other traffic statistics first such as extreme tracking. If there is nothing else, I go with alexa because it will at least give you a general idea. One other use for alexa is you can see what countries a sites traffic is made up of. I always look for sites with high US traffic. A site that is alexa 5,000 but with 99% chinese traffic is garbage to me. A site that is alexa 100,000 with 40% usa traffic is great.
Alexa is useful to get a rough idea how much traffic another site gets. But you can use your log files for your site and get accurate traffic details. For comparative purposes it is ok, but Alexa stats can be manipulated. Some advertisers may consider your Alexa rank before purchasing. This will give them a rough idea how your site stacks up. Also try compete.com. They provide stats too.
I have never really found it useful, and the numbers have never been right, sometimes i have had extremly high rank for a site i started that had little traffic and no rank for a site that gets lots of traffic each to thier own, some like this system others dont ...
Basically it is a poor measure of true traffic because as someone stated, it can be manipulated. It is best to always ask for true stats from the logs when buying a website or link for traffic. It does offer two main benefits. It improves the value of your site when you go to sell it. People are often times willing to pay higher prices for low Alexa rated sites. The other benefit is that many pay to write blog review sites will pay higher for blogs with higher Alexa ratings. They are two totally different measurements. Alexa measures traffic while PR measures the amount and value of your back links. Neither means a lot in the terms of true traffic but they offer value for selling links or blog posts and when it comes to selling a website.
Thanks for the explanation. That clears up my confusion. I'll try and concentrate on my site traffic stats as opposed to what Alexa says.
If some people use Alexa to value your website then it isn't just useless and a waste of time. My site has dropped from 8 mil to under 1 mil since it began 2 months ago, due to the new algo as far as i know?
Well, it's good to know now before I got my hopes up and sound like an idiot telling someone how goo my Alexa ranking is. I'm glad I asked the question.
Alexa is TERRIBLY inaccurate. It use to be good, but now it's just pathetic. My site has been increasing in popularity over the last few months, yet my alexa ranks keeps going up. 1000UV a day and I'm at 500,000 now. Three months ago I was getting 300 UV a day and my rank was 120,000.
Whenever I've tried to use the Alexa figure at Agency level to try amd impress for better ratings and prices, they laugh. I've stopped mentioning it now. It has to be one of the most over-rated and useless metrics going.