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Another question is about Alexa's count of your incoming links. Alexa shows one of my sites to have 167 incoming links but this tally has not changed in over a year. As a result, I am beginning to think that Alexa no longer performs the function of counting your incoming links. Am I correct or does Alexa only update this number once a year?
Alexa has been controversially discussed on this forum many many times. Just have a look on the search and you will find quite a lot of threads.
There are certain aspects of Alexa which are often considered negative that you need to be aware of. In no order whatsoever a few examples:
- the Alexa toolbar is often considered spyware and will be removed/disabled by certain tools
- the Alexa ranking feature can be easily fooled
- the Alexa affiliate program is often reported to generate results not in favour of its subscribers
- the Alexa toolbar's user community seems to consist mainly of webmasters and is therefore not representative for "regular" surfers
However, there are also positive sides:
- since the user community is mostly webmasters, the traffic and ranking reports on web-issue-related sites should be representative
- for really big sites (in the Amazon/eBay category), ranking and traffic should also be representative
As with every tool, you should use Alexa with care and with as much knowledge you can gather about it. Again: shuffle through the other threads on Alexa here on WW.
My best suggestion is to measure your success by your site's improvement and growth. In the long run, these are the only things that really matter.
I was at 500,000 and once I installed alexa bar and had it one while I worked on my site I shot up to 300,000.
Why? Because I inflated my visitor stats.
