crisscross - 5:37 am on Feb 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

Martinibuster:

We know what our competition's page views are because they publish them. In fact, they have told us face-to-face. We are higher, yet it is not reflected in Google (or other search engines) due to slow indexing of changes in our domain name over the past six months.

We do not use the toolbar to boost rankings. The rise in our ranking has been due to the consolidation of domains and the addition of new services. This rise was not sudden, but has taken place over the last four or so months.

You seem to think that Alexa is unreliable because it has many Korean sites. The relative ranking of Korean sites is only useful for Korean sites against each other. Other sites within a certain category can use Alexa to track popularity against their competitors. For example, UK computer games sites can use the stats to measure against each other.

I suspect that Alexa will create filters for non-English language sites soon.

As you pointed out, Alexa states that sites with less than 100,000 ranking are unreliable and that sampling more results means more accuracy. Our ranking is now 6,000.

Perhaps tracking your keywords in Search Engines is a good method of showing your popularity against other sites. It seems a bit abstract for most our clients, readers and staff.

My hope is that Google will create a similar system to Alexa so that we can track site rankings on a more frequent basis than the current system.