OK, I'd bet this question has already been asked on DP a number of times. However, the reason why I'm asking is because I have the same poll running on my blog, so I would like to compare the results. I'll appreciate a vote on my blog too.. I'd also like to see you post your opinions on Alexa like "Alexa totally sucks" or "I love Alexa".. Thanks for participating!
I don't think Alexa is an accurate measure for site traffic. Not everyone uses their toolbar or related links software.
How could it be accurate? it only takes in to account the people who have the alexa toolbar installed. Those kinds os statistics are never worth looking at.
alexa is not all that accurate! as the webmaster sites tends to get a higher rank. most of the alexa toolbar installers are the webmasters. perhaps google toolbar could have given a better results! but then google dose not offer such a ranking facility! anyways, alexa for me it matters! most of us are happy to see better alexa ranks, what do you say
Alexa is fairly accurate for probably top 10K sites due to large sample size. It gets less and less accurate as you move down. Lets say one site has a ranking of 1,230,000 and the other one is 900,000 - this means NOTHING.
Google PR demonstrates the authority and popularity of sites through its numerous ranking algorithms (link popularity is a major factor). Unlike Alexa that relies on the toolbar and thus isn't accurate, Google takes information from every site on the internet. That means that Google is very precise when ranking sites.
Above a certain number of users, yes, it is accurate. For most websites, it is not. It cannot be accurate. Just to see how accurate it was, I took one of my sites, installed the toolbar on my computer, and made it refresh every 5 seconds. I let it run for 3 days. Alexa went through the ROOF. Its not accurate, cannot determine unique visitors, and really isn't anything to judge a website by.
Among other things, I usually take a look at Alexa Stats when I'm planning to buy links on a site. I know it's not precise, but I can get a idea. If someday Google launchs his own stats, it will be much more precise because IMO the Google toolbar is widely used .
I don't consider it accurate at all. It's more of a "fun, useless" stat than anything. It's too bad so many ad networks take alexa rank into consideration, since it can be faked so easily.
True, it will give you a ballpark figure of the traffic, but as I said cannot accurately be used to check a websites traffic. I still believe that the EXACT traffic is best kept private, unless you want it public, in which case I suggest extremetracking.
PR only demonstrates the PR of the pages linking to a specific page. It doesn't take into consideration authority or popularity at all. And considering that authority and anchor text are the two important things in backlinks PR is utterly meaningless. As for it being "accurate", Toolbar PR of 5 could be anything from 4.51 to 5.49 in real PR. Not very accurate at all.
Who has the toolbar installed? -- those who sites that rank well! It's not an objective measure of traffic.