How important is alexa ranking ?

Can it be regarded as THE standard when it comes to measuring traffic popularity of sites ?

Is there any probablity google has alexa rank as one of the parameters in their long 'secret' list of parameters to judge a site ?

 

I don't think it is THE standard, however, it can give you a feel for how much traffic a site has. Be careful how you use it. You must compare a site's Alexa rating against other sites in its niche. You can't compare a webmaster site to an automobile site because people who are webmasters are more likely to have the Alexa tool bar or an Alexa browser widget installed. As a result, webmaster type site rank higher than other types of sites. This same phenomenon happens across all niches.

 

Depending on what you're doing it can be pretty important. When I apply to affiliate companies they always look and comment on my Alexa rank.

 

I think Alexa Rank have a small implication in PR results. The secret is to manipulate this thing in you advantage (you can install Alexa toolbar for example). In the past Alexa rank had a more important role but Google can see the manipulation of webmasters and decrease Alexa rank importance.

 

I am sorry, but there is NO reason at all why google would use Alexa ranking in its algorithm.

Google has much more information about traffic than Alexa. Because they got information from
1. google bar (much more popular than Alexa bar),
2. Adsense
3. google Analytics
4. search results (Google keeps individual data for 9 months and then on an anonymous basis)
5. and so on...

Furthermore, Alexa shows only rough approximation, sometimes completely wrong. Alexa may just be used to know(for instance) that a site with a 4.050.900 ranking has a significantly lower traffic than a site with a 8.224 ranking. Alexa has a strong bias in favour of webmaster sites and sites in English. Since you need sometimes information about traffic of other sites, you still have a look at Alexa ranking because you have not a lot of other public sources.

Why should google use (often) wrong figures of Alexa when they have the right ones?

 

And how does alexa handle fake/bot/traffic exchange traffic ?
Or is this kind of traffic transparent to alexa ?

 

I would not be concerned with it. Google get's the traffic count from somewhere else since they are so far appart in number. Look at your site's logs, and you will see that it is just BS.

 

Alexa continuously improves its statistics. It succeeds in detecting and correcting some traffic spams, it does not succeed in correcting some other ones or won't to do so . But of course it will never tell you how it works.

As mentioned above, the main problem is probably not spam. But, Alexa collects traffic data from a too limited sample of people. Alexa is nearly unknown outside the webmaster and English-speaking world.

 

I do not believe in Alexa, i have developed a web site a year ago and since then the monthly traffic has extremely increased, but Alexa shows that i have the same traffic rank since then.

 

alexa rank is important if you monitize you sites

 

What is Alexa Ranking?

This is a ranking system set by alexa.com (a subsidiary of amazon.com ) that basically audits and makes public the frequency of visits on various Web sites. The algorithm according to which Alexa traffic ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed over a period of three months.

This traffic is based on such parameters as reach and page views. The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day. Page view, as its name shows, is the number of times a particular page (URL) is viewed by Alexa users. Alexa.com makes it clear though that, if a particular user visits the same URL multiple times on the same day, all those visits will be counted as one.

The first step of the ranking process is calculating the reach and number of page views for all the sites on the Web on a daily basis. The Alexa ranking is obtained by performing the geometric mean of reach and page views, averaged over a predefined period of time (three months).

How Alexa Ranking Works

It's quite easy to get started. All you have to do is visit the alexa.com site and download (and install) the Alexa toolbar . This toolbar offers a search function but it mainly displays the rank (at a global level) of the visited site, as well as the sites that have been visited by Web surfers that are linked in some way to the site being visited.

The Alexa toolbar not only displays information, but it also sends data to the central server. Thus, each time you visit a Web page via a Web browser (be it Internet Explorer or Firefox) that has the toolbar installed, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting. Such data is gathered from all the Web users who have the Alexa toolbar.

With Alexa, the smaller the numerical ranking, the better. Most people say that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000, it is a sign that your site enjoys quite heavy traffic.

Is Alexa Ranking Worth Anything?

Benefits

* Alexa Traffic can be used as a competitive intelligence tool but you should take into consideration the fact that its sample size of audience is too small; Just enter your competitor's site in the "Compare Sites" section and measure the results of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors'.

 

alexa its a simple to have an idea about one site.
its not to trusted .... too much

 

Alexa is only useful to me when selling sites

 

It is very important to know the popularity and traffic driven efforts of people. I got very use to it as I always take a look at it for example right now DP is 387 and I can see it all the time.

 

it's just reference, i have try to add in SEO, it rank increase up to 5 million within few days. but they take time to update the rank and population

 

I dont look at alexa, it doesnt update much even when traffic is increasing it just stays the same Lol so you can just take a rough idea from it thats all...

 

i not believe in alexa rank, bcoz still dont know on basis of which factor it will give rank. so statistic is not perfecrt.

 

i don't think alexa rank has too much relevance..it only works if you are using an alex toolbaar which generally an average number of people are using.. so don't be too concerned about it...

 

I think alexa rank is quite important when u r selling ad space on your website through some ad networks... Its also a simple method to find out which sites in your niche are getting more traffic than you.

 

Alexa only gives an estimation of traffic your getting, I usually use it to check if my site is going good on its traffic...