Alexa rating

How reliable is this?

[vik_c]

A site from my country is below 10,000 in Alexa. Yet, as per Overture only about a hundred people search for it by name. Doesn't seem to make sense at all. I know sites which are at over 2,00,000 in Alexa and which have 2,000 searches in a month in Overture. What could be wrong? Could this site be artificially improving its Alexa rank?

[abbeyvet]

At those levels Alexa is pretty meaningless and can be seriously skewed by just a few regular visitors/admins with the toolbar installed.

[vik_c]

At those levels Alexa is pretty meaningless and can be seriously skewed by just a few regular visitors/admins with the toolbar installed.

That's my point. This site I'm talking about belongs to a client of mine and I *know* it gets over 100,000 uniques every month. Yet the Alexa rating is 200,000 plus.

[Rugles]

>>>>Doesn't seem to make sense at all.

It makes sense, Alexa gets its data from their toolbar. The toolbar is not very popular.

If you want to see your Alexa rankings take a big leap, install it on as many computers as you have access to, then surf, surf surf your site only.

[httpwebwitch]

Alexa enables a classic and highly unethical sting you can pull on SEO clients or your own boss. Get one of them focused on the Alexa ratings, and you can pull them around like puppets on a string.

One day you can change a few <title> tags, then the next day their Alexa rating skyrockets. It's Magic! You have the Midas touch!

[MajorFm]

Those sites that get alot of hits but have bad alexa rankings are most probably niche market sites that have users that dont use the toolbar, simple as that... alexa seems to be the god in some people's eyes, they use it to judge the world's internet stats...

If google used the google toolbar to do this, that would be something else... i don't know anyone that doesn't have that toolbar installed!