OK, I see Alexa mentioned ALL OVER the web as if it's some sort of way to find where a website really stands. But, in my opinion, the data at Alexa is completely flawed. I stopped caring about Alexa a year and a half ago when by simply installing the toolbar and visiting my site several times a day I could easily jump to the top 60,000. When I stopped visiting my site so often, and with the toolbar, the rank would drop. A good example of the inaccuracy of Alexa is ConservaBlogs.com. The site is top 3,000 at Technorati, top 75 at TTLB, and August will bring us 100,000 unique visits and over 400,000 page views. How then, can it be stuck back at 344,000 at Alexa? How many sites in the top 200,000 at Alexa are clearing 100,000 visits a month? I mean, if I'm wrong please set me straight. But this just seems to give people a false perception of web placement. Does it not? Thoughts?
Yeah you're right, I also have a site that has had over 300 000 uniques in a month and we have another site that has had only 15 000 uniques for the month, the second site with 15 000 uniques ranks higher some days and in the top 70 000. I think the emphasis on Page Views per User can be or is flawed, I guess this was to combat the auto surfs and hit blast type software, but this also effects legitimate sites.
Alexa's rankings, as you pointed out, are based on the number of people having an Alexa toolbar in their computer. Therefore depending on the niche of the site and various other factors, disparities are bound to occur. Alexa isn't full proof- not everybody has the toolbar.
I agree, they are just about useless because many people do not have the tool bar so they are not even tracked. I have never relied on them for much but when I sold a few sites, the buyer was really concerned with it. When I showed my stats, he ignored the low stats in Alexa. To me they are an overrated source of skewed information.
Since I had a need to rant about it, I decided to write a post about Alexa being useless. If you do a search for "alexa" here on DP, you'll see how many people actually believe it has significant value.