Is alexa user traffic toolbar accurate?

There is a large discrepancy between my site's logs and alexa. Traffic to my site has fallen by 20% in logs yet alexa has it improving by 300,000 sites in terms of visits. Any one else see the same thing?

 

I don't trust Alexa ranking or its tool bar. It can be manipulated easily. but poor rank in Alexa does mean the site is not very good.

 

I thought the Alexa website was to determine the popularity of websites? Not whether they're good or not?

 

It only gives rank by gathering data from Alexa toolbar users online. Not by any server logs.

Like Shawn said for High volume sites it is great, low volume sites are able to increase their rank by going to the sites many times themselves when they use the toolbar.

By the way it is in all of the spyware scanners spyware profiles also.

Most toolbars will be down the road when the spyware software companies lose their fear.

 

Alexa represents a small minority of web users, and of course those users must use IE. And I'll bet that if research was done only certain types of people use the Alexa toolbar, which means it's a poor representation of the general web user population. So, it's a poor judge of how often sites are visited, with the possible exception of the major sites. Of course sites related to Apple, Linux and Sun products are probably further down the list than they should be.

 

You can go to Ebay and buy an Alexabooster for 10 bucks, use it for a few days and you will rank in whatever place you want.

Don't trust Alexa rankings any more... too easy to manipulate.

 

My site for webmasters has a better Alexa rating than my politics site, which receives ten times the amount of traffic.

It appears that webmasters use the Alexa toolbar considerably more than your average web visitor.