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I need quick help on whether alexa.com powered by google is at all accurate. I'm trying to find how popular a particular site is and how many visits it gets a day. alexa.com doesn't show exact numbers, but is based on 1 million random users that use their toolbar (sticky me if there's site that's better for tracking visits to any site.)
Here's the strange thing though. At overture, I type in "kawasaki dirt bikes" to see the search volume and it pops up as about 3,000. The site in question is #3 on google SERP for this search term. When I go into alexa.com, I see that the visits is only 1 out of 1,000,000 visitors (so if there were 100 million visits a day, that means that this site gets 100 visits a day-- 1 X 100)
On a similar note, another site I checked had only 1,500 under overture's search volume positioned the same at #3 on Goo SERPs, but on alexa.com, it's visits were 23 of 1 million or 2,300 daily if calculating the same as above. That's 23 times better than the above.
I know for sure that both of these site's visitors are coming from SE's. Question is who should I trust? Overture or alexa.com?
Moreover, would ranking on spots #1-#5 on Goo SERPs be considered good for search terms that have search volumes of about 3,000 to 5,000 and about 20,000 total results when doing a phrase match on Goo? One company had SEO'd about 3 of these sites ranking #1-#5 but on alexa.com, results of visitors were terrible -- less than 1 out of 1,000,000
Please any comments would be great!
Alexa is well known, but their stats visit stats are not terribly accurate.. the toolbar isn't too widely used.
Example: I pushed a 'dead' site of mine from somewhere around 2.5 million ranking to approx 170,000 ranking just by installing the toolbar and setting the site as my homepage.. everytime I open my browser, bingo, rankings climb. Similar stories abound.
I would say it's probably fairly accurate for the top couple of thousand sites... but hey, they're mostly so big that there's no great surprise to their rank.
Do a site search for 'Alexa toolbar' and I'm sure you'll find lots of discussion.
