Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Alexa is NOT accurate. It is easily influenced and anyone who takes its figures at face value is kidding themselves. This is aside from all the privacy issues it throws up.
Let me give a concrete example:
On a development server which only five people had access to (all with Alexa installed) the ranking went from 3 million plus to 17,000 in two months... What does that tell you?
Another example: WebmasterWorld is in the top 500 sites on the net in Alexa. Is this really the case? No. It is there because a disproportionate number of people accessing WebmasterWorld have the Alexa toolbar installed. WebmasterWorld is popular - but it isn't anywhere near that popular.
Also: many popular sites (some teen sites and gaming sites for example) have terrible Alexa rankings but are known to be incredibly popular. Why? Because no one with the Alexa toolbar visits...
Alexa is an interesting idea, but the figures mean very little. The sooner people start to realise this the better.
Cat is out of the bag, and I predict more & more sites citing "Alexa ranking X" as something to crowe about.
ROFL! :P
However, I think it's fair to say that Alexa is useful to the extent that it shows who has reasonable traffic and who's way down in the cellar. And when you reach a certain level (50,000, say), your 3-month average is likely to be fairly stable and only minimally affected by whether you're using the Alexa toolbar.
Caveat: Alexa's numbers are wacko as I write this. My site's 3-month dropped from about 30,000 to 200,000-something, but the detailed traffic report says that number is up by 12,000. Another site that I was looking at yesterday dropped from the 300,000s into the one-million something. And I saw a mention in another thread of CNN being in the 1.1 million ballpark.
Alexa is NOT accurate
Who said it was? :-)
It's just one of many tools on the net. An appreciation of how it works, and where it falls down helps to put any Alexa ranking you see in perspective.
It's long been common knowledge that if you have half a dozen PCs between you and your colleagues you can make big swings on Alexa. And that's even after their re-vamp of the algo last year.
Posting your traffic and rank at sillyjokes.co.uk/alexa may help the overall webmaster community better appreciate Alexa's limitations.
Does anyone use trafficranking.com? They've given my technical site a lower rank than Alexa has, but they have me sandwitched between two very attractive Hollywood actresses :-)
<edit> typo </edit>
It's long been common knowledge that if you have half a dozen PCs between you and your colleagues you can make big swings on Alexa. And that's even after their re-vamp of the algo last year.
It isn't just Alexa. I can remember when MediaMetrix let About.com include traffic from its third-party Luna Network advertising affiliates for ranking purposes. And there was a column somewhere (in Forbes, I think) about the use of pop-up advertising windows to inflate traffic numbers and boost MediaMetrix rankings. Poor methodologies and loopholes will always be exploited, but it's still possible to draw broad conclusions from Alexa and other ranking methods. And the higher the ranking of your site, the less easy it is to create "big swings on Alexa" by having half a dozen PCs that use the Alexa toolbar.
And the higher the ranking of your site, the less easy it is to create "big swings on Alexa" by having half a dozen PCs that use the Alexa toolbar
Absolutely! Your ability to manipulate Alexa - not that this is something you want to do - will be determined by where you are in Alexa now. Anywhere between 20K and 3 million+ will be fairly open to such abuse. If like Yahoo.com you're at #1 then even if you had six million colleagues with the Alexa toolbar it won't get you any higher ;-)
Sid
Aaron
You don't get something for nothing.
