Anybody know. if u go to their site, they say something like, write to mozilla to develop a toolbar for firefox. I thought it wasn't that hard to write a firefox toolbar. Can't alexa do it themselves. I kind of like alexa.
I successfully use a.m. search status since a few months on my firefox 2.x no delay in page loading noticed and full alexa functionality except the support for siteinfo.xml is still missing - alexa rank is supported and much more.
Alexa traffic measure is very unaccurate, anyway, a lot of people keep using it as a monitor for surfing behavior. For xample, Text-link-ads. For sure, there's "something" that makes developers no to try a toolbar for FF
No its not. Like any other metric it can be manipulated but i don't think it is that innaccurate. Also, can you propose a better traffic metric?
Google Analytics. Alexa is notoriously inaccurate. We conducted an experiment installing the A toolbar ONLY on our Admin account PC's. Since they work on the back end of the site, our ranking jumped a ridiculous amount in mere days. There are sites with higher A rankings that get FAR less traffic, have less content, and less backlinks - so I place absolutely no faith in it as a serious metric of site strength or popularity.
Alexa clearly outlines the factors and the formula they use to calculate the rankings. It is no hidden secret. With this said, I disagree with you and would say you re-evaluate the factors. How long did the experiment last. How old was the site? Was the site in the 100k? How well of an understanding you have of the reach, and page view terms which alexa uses, which actually compute the rankings? How well do u understand the factors which can inflate and compromise a real alexa ranking? Did you compare your results with another metric? How many ajax pages in ur experiment? Did you calculate the ratio of inaccuracy in +/-, how much was it off?
Why would I waste my time disproving a metric that's generally accepted to be next to useless in the Webmaster community? That's time better used developing content and marketing our sites. If I were getting paid to assess their usefuness (or defend it as a legitimate ranking tool), I'd apply myself thoroughly to it. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enUS203US203&q=Alexa+useless
Alexa is useless as a monitor of a site's worth. I do not have a huge network. I have me and uhm... my mum and eh... that's it. When she and I both pointed at one of my domains it came to about 60,000 odd in Alexa. Take off the tool bar and it drops like a lead balloon. If two people can make such a difference what is the value of those figures other than pulling the wool over the unwary?
Well u said that you conducted an experiment on which you based your decision of alexa rankings to be notoriously inaccurate. I was trying to see how much real technical knowhow went into that experiment and how extensive it was. Seems it merely involved a member of your community to download the toolbar for a few days and come up with your misconception. And now ur saying if u were getting paid, u would assess its usefulness more. You show me a google search with appr 300k results. Try changing ur own search from Alexa useless to Alexa useful and u get 4 times that many results. I still don't see any solid criteria which proves alexa results to be highly inaccurate. Like I said, they have outlined the factors which compute the rankings and that is what they go by.
my 2 cents on this is the following. being hihg in alexa rank like on the top shakers page, even for a day would have a huge (positive) impact on your webpage. to me that is the only reason to worry about alexa. as for the no tool bar in FF, I am not sure, but I think a redirect thru an alexa url wil do the same thing. it's worked for me (or so it seems)