Forum Moderators: phranque
Mine is 670,000s after 4 months with 75 articles. My first site, its growing fast, I'm hoping for 750 articles before the end of the year (I got 4 months completely free to work on site in summer)
I looked at the toolbar once and decided it was spyware and never went back.
Unless you're looking at a big traffic site, then short term stats are hugely inaccurate, however if you look at the three months stats or better still the one and two year traffic trends, then they'll give you a much better picture.
For example, look at the two year trend for looksmart.com and then compare with webmasterworld.com - this tells you a *lot* about the fortunes of these two sites.
However, if you're looking at lower traffic sites (i.e. the rest of us) then there's another consideration - visitor demographics. I run a variety of web sites and I've come to the conclusion that certain visitor demographics are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than others. If you want to compare site statistics, it's important to pick something with similar demographics to get a fair comparison.
Usually any thread I read about Alexa turns into an argument. But it's not all it's cracked up to be, but it's not completely useless either - like all tools it's knowing how to use it that counts.
Oh yes, the answer to your question is that my top site bubbles along at 50,000-150,000 regardless of how many visitors it gets. The best I ever managed was a ranking of about 5,000 - but that was with only a couple of thousand visitors. Go figure.
Ditto, I couldn't care less! There are multiple irritating ways to manipulate it, and best of luck to those who give a hoot and do so for vacuous PR reasons, for whatever it's worth. More power to them, but some of us still need convincing.
It's about the willingness to suspend disbelief in the service of pleasuring one's vanity.
If configured that ways, they BOTH report surfing patterns "back home"... Maybe Alexa is to blame that they don't tell honestly and openly WHAT they actually report back. But we have the believe Google too that they play fair and only report back what they tell us.
What - as a webmaster - I like with the Alexa toolbar is that it shows the 3 most similar sites directly in the bar. With the Googlebar it's two mouseclicks away :-)
Actually at the moment I have all three installed: Google, Yahoo Beta with "WebRank", and Google.
Oh, back on topic: my main site is ~1.800.00 in Alexa (and counting <grin>)
I'd say it doesn't mean a thing.
Numbers, in my mind, are totally meaningless.
Absolutely!
It is such an easy thing to manipulate. I know of a "web search scheme.. errr.. company"....cough cough, that brags about its Alexa ranking when talking to potential suckers ... errrr.... investors.
They keep misrepresenting my sites without proper disclaimers. Since some people are so clueless as to actually make business decsions based on Alexa numbers, I believe their lousy data has actually cost me money.
As if their crazy-ass rankings are not bad enough, within the last few months they've started mis-reporting on things like site speed and pop-ups. They claim one of my sites has 14% of sessions with pop-ups even though their are none.
The reason, they define any new window opening including target parameters and user initiated actions as a pop-up. So, if someone right clicks and chooses open link in new window (or shift-clicks), Alexa believes this is a pop-up.
I cannot believe Amazon allows such insanity to continue.
As for a class action lawsuit, well ... that's kinda silly really. The information is displayed based on Alexa toolbar users, and that notice is pretty clear everywhere you go as to how accurate it is, etc. It's also very clear that ranks over 100,000 aren't accurate at all.
It's nice to know that at least for sites under 100k you can get an idea of what kind of traffic they get compared to other sites. I find it VERY useful when I'm looking to buy advertising - if a site claims they get millions of visitors a week and their Alexa rank says otherwise, even though I know Alexa isn't completely accurate I would be pretty confident in my decision NOT to buy advertising from that site because the webmaster is lying about how much traffic they get.
The mere concept of a polling or ranking service that doesn't even try to take a representative sample and lets people sign up themselves in order to influence their own stats is just pathetic.
Read their so-called privacy statement. It spells out in wonderous detail how it will gather all sorts of info about you and feed it back into Amazon's database. Websites you visit, products you purchased, the contents of forms you fill out.
This is worth having for the sake of "rankings" that are questionable at best? Spyware in my book.
Wayne
One factor that affect Alexa is the type of site and the typical visitor. Sites I work with (and those of people I know) are visited my many people in businesses using office PCs, with the PCs set up by corporate IT departments. They are not allowed, or at least are not interested, in installing things like Alexa. (The Google tool bar seems to be approved by many company IT people). Part of the Alexa problem is that not many people want to take the time to call the IT department and request that they be allowed to install Alexa.
Sites usually visited by people using their own home PCs will rank better than those usually visited by people at their office desk. Of the two sites I mention above, the best ranking is one tbhat provides computer information to webmasters; the lower rank one provides information about business insurance contracts and related matters.
The Alexa toolbar was only installed on ONE PC. Mine. The webmasters's.
explains one day why I should
Hits=Visitors for most people. Along those lines, if the current metric is Alexa...then use 'em if you got 'em
[edited by: ScottM at 11:54 pm (utc) on April 4, 2004]
Well, I'll grant you this much: When I was still being penalised by Yahoo, the number one site that would show up for my site's name was Alexa.
But then and even now, any visits from Alexa amount to a fraction of a percent. Very negligible.
I don't know and I don't really care.I looked at the toolbar once and decided it was spyware and never went back.
Ditto. In fact, Alexa is the one single reason that the ONLY SE I ever use is Google. The rest of 'em give me the shimblenidders....
[Lately, unfortunately, Google is doing some truly strange **** which makes me SERIOUSLY unhappy, such as NOT filtering out sites with "adult" [read "porn", and not even thinly disguised porn!] content and/or images even though explicitly instructed to do so through Preferences; and not adhering to providing search results for sites in English only....
What's up with this anyway?]
Last week my main site was ~1.800.000.
TODAY, my main site is ~640.000.
Now guess when I installed the Alexa toolbar again :-)
has been discussed to death over at the amazon associate forum where the toolbar is considered one step up from Satan's evil elder brother.
maybe half a step....
Lest I contribute to the hijacking of this thread, I'll also add that I've got sites ranging from the hundred thousands down to the 10,000 range - none are really in the statistically meaningful zone.
Imagine Site A and Site B both in the same industry, both with the same type of information, both with the same number of visitors. Pretty much exactly the same.
Now Site A goes out and hires a usability consultant who figures out how to improve the navigation so visitors can find information with less clicks. Suddenly Site A's Alexa rating goes up (gets worse) because the toolbar records less avarage pageviews. Site B looks better to Alexa because it has worse usability.
Ya, anything less than 5k is what they call the 'too lame to list' list. It just isn't reliable under 5k.
What free traffic ratings service do you use instead?
I find [metricsmarket.com...] to be a flawed but better free source of traffic info.
Footnotes
*You also have to discount Alexa itself, and for some reason loads of sites in Korea.
