My problem with Alexa toolbar

How accurate?

[antipodes]

It seems almost every site I look up lately from the Alexa toolbar stats have hits of 3M+.

Now some of these sites are pretty dodgy and I'm getting kind of suspicious about how accurate these stats are.

For example, I looked up a site made in frames. Appears to have no SE considerations whatsoever yet according to Alexa it had an extraordinary 3M+ hits. This is a local area company who sell a building product. They are not a remarkable company and don't appear to be using the web well at all.
Can anyone shed some light on this query?

thx
antipodes

[whats up skip]

I think you will find that the figures it gives you are nothing more than an educated guess.

Remember some sites may receive lots of traffic from links not search engines. This could really change their estimates.

To be honest I would not waste you time with it. Like it or not it is a Google world at the moment.

[Toasted]

The Alexa bar doesn't show number of hits, it show's the rank of the site based on traffic... so a site that is ranked 3m+ has a very low rank (and probably wouldn't get many hits at all).

Have a look at a few popular sites and check their Alexa rankings - for instance, I think google is '5'... this doesn't mean they only get 5 hits a day or whatever, it means they are the 5th most popular site on the Internet - big difference ;)

[antipodes]

Toasted...the Alexa site has a link for each part, such as page rank, taffic etc., on the link it states that traffic is how many ppl with the alexa toolbar visited that site. Page rank is a separate link/stat.

I'm gettin confused!

[Toasted]

yeah, it only counts the number of hits that the site gets from users with the alexa toolbar... but instead of telling you the number of hits the site got - it adds them up and then ranks them against every other site on the internet that has had a hit from a user with the alexa tool bar.

So... if a site has had 1000 hits, they would be ranked above a site that has had 990 hits etc. (note: the smaller the number, the better the alexa traffic rank).

Think of it this way - it adds up the number of hits for every site it has info on. It then sorts that data, listing the site with the most number of hits first - this site becomes #1, the next site is #2 etc. all the way down to the last site it has info for, which is somewhere around #4,000,000

Just remember that the smaller the number the better - anything under 100,000 is pretty good (although that depends on what you think of as pretty good of course).

[John_Caius]

Here is a link from a previous thread on calibrating the Alexa traffic rank - a graph of traffic versus traffic rank that you should find interesting:

www.marketing-strategy.info/alexachart.html

[asinah]

Our site is ranked on alexa with Pos. 74,000 and we receive about 7500 users per day in general.