Does Alexa have any value at all? It's *so* easy to boost your own rank (I've just gone from 2m to 140k on one site) artificially it can't have any real value can it?
Alexa rankings are absolutely meaningless The Alexa website traffic monitoring system is so inaccurate as to be worse than useless - it is very misleading. Perhaps most concerning is that it is trivially easy for website owners to manipulate their own rankings.
Its relativley easy to get in the top 100000, even with a new site and that is easy to manipulate as there are many sites which people have just given up on - once you get into the top 20,000 or something like that - it gets a bit harder and then harder to get in the top 10,000 and 5000 Thats what I have found
its only purpose that i've found is that if you are under 100k, most tier1 cpm networks will accept you.
it's worthless on a user's point of view, but it can serve a couple purposes for webmasters just because it exists.
A lot of people say/know that Alexa is not on the money. And I agree. But, there is some level of accuracy to it. I mean, not to many people on here could out rank Google on alexa by cheating.
Well, no ... probably not. At least not if you haven't deliberately installed some of their software. The issue is the 'Related Links' feature of IE (pre-XP SP2) which appears as the 'Tools'/'Show Related Links' menu item (and a corresponding toolbar button if you added it from the 'Customize...' link on the toolbar). If you use that feature, IE will contact the Alexa servers, via MSN, to obtain information about other web pages which seem to be related, open an Explorer Bar, and display those (plus adverts and whatnot). Just to be clear, this feature is 'spyware', if you use it. If you do so, you will be sending information to MSN and Alexa obtained by spying, because there is nowhere that Microsoft adequately discloses and documents that privacy 'leak'. Sure, Alexa have some information on it, and a pretty clear privacy policy, but you don't get to know of Alexa's involvement until after you use the feature, and even then you have to hunt for it, and even then no mention is made of MSN's interstitial involvement. Don't blame Alexa though - it's Microsoft's responsibility to provide their users with complete and truthful disclosure - and they haven't.
Well on my opinion, additional info about site traffic and where the traffic is coming from is always welcome. You don't necessarily need to boost the Alexa Ranking but you can actually use it to monitor where you are. Alexa rankings usually comes from Canadian and Upper US areas, meaning if you are targeting those locations, Alexa would probably help you to target the traffic more accurately.