Alexa Traffic...

[futureX]

How exactly does alexa index the traffic from a url, do it just do it from its links or is there some other way? I'm pretty confused about how this works :)

[rogerd]

Hi, Futurex, welcome to WebmasterWorld. If it is the Alexa traffic rankings you are referring to, they are based on visits by users who have the Alexa toolbar installed.

Their accuracy has been debated here, but I think the quick answer is that for very high volume sites they may be fairly good, at least for comparison purposes. For low volume sites, they are less reliable. Overall, they may be influenced by the percentage of users who have Alexa installed, which is not necessarily random (i.e., more webmasters may use it than non-techies).

[futureX]

i guess no-one who comes to my site uses the toolbar lol :o

Any idea how many people actually have the bar?

[John_Caius]

Traffic rank seems to have some significance below a figure of around 100,000. If you download the toolbar yourself then you will kick your traffic rank to somewhere in the region of 150,000 - 400,000 depending on how much you browse your own site. Apparently several million people have it installed but there is regional bias, especially towards Korea.

[Brett_Tabke]

Alexa says there are 7mil dls. That figure is stale from mid last year though. I've got a hunch that it's double that now.

[cornwall]

>>If you download the toolbar yourself then you will kick your traffic rank to somewhere in the region of 150,000 - 400,000

As John_Caius says, if you want, for personal or business reasons, to bump up your ratings on alexa, then get the toolbar yourself.

At best it is a comparative rather than an absolute measure

[jeremy goodrich]

Alexa rankings can be funny, as we've seen many times before.

7 million downloads is a whole lot of data though - wonder what % of those (even if the userbase is bigger now) surf regularly?

Might be neat if Alexa gave out a bit more data on their users aggregate behavior - no personal details, just more statistics & charts. I love charts. :)