p.p.s Shawn, Nobody has contacted me but, I think I'm in danger of hijacking this thread - so I'd also like to add my own congratulations to those already offered. (If anyone is interested in doing an Alexa experiment, please PM me and I'll start an appropriate thread.) Go DP !
Wow, for being top 500 in the world shouldnt this site have over 500,000+ members and thousands browsing at all times? Dont get me wrong this site rules, but I know tons of other sites that stay packed 24/7 and they are only ranked in 2000 - 20,000 like these sites: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=forums.offtopic.com http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=gaiaonline.com Especially the gaia online, look at these stats now at 7 AM: Who is Online - In total there are 6906 users online :: 5943 Registered, 650 Hidden and 313 Guests Gaia has 333,638,916 articles posted with 2,323,461 registered users. Most users ever online was 32,499 on Sun Mar 27, 2005 6:24 pm
Why? I'm surprised that ANYONE has the Alexa toolbar installed... and I don't know why any webmaster, who should know how meaningless Alexa rankings are, would want to waste desktop/broswer space on it...
I for one do, and I'm sure many other webmasters would be of the same opinion that it isnt that meaningless the data if used correctly. Put it this way... it's pretty hard to fake a poor Alexa ranking.
It's not hard to fake a good one. Try this... with the Alexa toolbar enabled, go to your own site and refresh the page a few times... watch your Alexa ranking climb in another window as you do this. It is statistically flawed and useless as a measure of anything at all.
Is that true?? I don't spend much time on windows, and doubt Alexa toolbar is available for those toy Macintoshes yet, but that's a little shocking that one person's repeated refreshes could cause an immediate rise. Nonetheless, it is only based on people with the toolbar installed (right)? So that may statistically suggest relative numbers, but it leaves out a large segment of the surfing population. whenever I use shawn's keyword suggestion tool (Overture/WordTracker), I look at the numbers and hope that they're representative -- relative to one another. The google numbers must be magnitudes larger. A sub-500 traffic rank is awesome shawn! Dr. Ken's at 205 today though, so keep promoting...
Sadly, yes. We did an experiment with this a couple of years back at another forum. Precisely. And it's not just a small sample but not even a representative sample -- it violates all assumptions of sampling theory. All the nukbers tell you is that how much traffic a particular site is getting compared to other sites that happen to be visited by other people who have the Alexa toolbar installed.
minstrel how accurate is this? I visit my site everyday repeatedly with the toolbar installed, the only Alexa ranking updates I ever see is with each big update.
Have a look here: http://www.bandofgonzos.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=158 More information here: http://www.google.com/search?source...-20,GGLG:en&q=site:www.bandofgonzos.com+alexa
I didnt get a chance to read the whole thread, but taking a quick glance at the forum, there's over 30,000 posts from 350 users. Which suggests, few people are making most of the discussion, hence the 240,000 Alexa ranking
thanks for those references Minstrel. I guess I only find alexa rankings amusing at best, being above the first page fold at Google, MSN and Y! for some search term I make money from is immensely more interesting. But I'm sure you feel the same way. I kind of doubt anyone is out there wasting the time to consistently pump up their alexa rank, unless it's done by an automaton (script...). Cause what's the point? If there is a point, I'm naive here. But assuming the toolbar is only available for windows users, that leaves out everyone on Linux, other flavors of Unix, Mac, not to mention those who like another contributor to this thread, and myself, tend to shun toolbars when I know someone's using that nifty tool to make me part of their statistics. I may be in the minority, but I don't even go in for the supermarket keychain dongles with barcodes which save you 50 cents on the english muffins this week if you flash it across the scanner. I'd rather not be tracked if the upside for me is trivial.
The point is simply that if it's that easy to manipulate it's meaningless as a measure of anything. Add that to the inherent sampling error and what do you have? A flawed measure from a non-representative sample of internet surfers.
But look what has happened to the rank of the forums thereafter... their has been no inflation even with the same core users. Let me ask you this minstrel, if you wish to advertise on someones site for direct traffic benefits, do you take into account the Alexa rank?