Alexa Rankings

How accurate and relevant are they?

[sadelb]

Are alexa rankings accurate? I hear of programs that can make your alexa ranking much better than it really is? Is there a way to see how many actual uniques a site receives a day or are alexa rankings the only site that shows you something like this?

[pmkpmk]

Completely irrelevant for sites not among the top-500 (ok, let's say top-1000).

Look into the archives - this has been discussed over and over again on WebmasterWorld.

[jo1ene]

They're not. The ratings are based on figures obtained through their toolbar. It's kinda like a poll/survey. We all know how accurate polls/surveys are.

[pmkpmk]

But onyl very few users use the toolbar. When I used it for 2 weeks, my main site suddenly jumped up a few thousand(!) places.

Sites below the top-1000 simply don't have enough exposure to toolbar-users to provide accurate measurings.

[txbakers]

What's alexa? Never heard of it.

[oddsod]

The results are not accurate evidenced by the fact that companies are offering to improve your site's rank. There are other issues with Alexa including the fact that the toolbar is considered spyware. Wayback is not on the ball anymore.

However, if you know how to use it Alexa can be a very useful tool. :)

[incrediBILL]

Don't know if I agree with your cavalier dismissal of the alexa results as they seem to be somewhat statiscally close to reality even below the top 1,000. I would never use them as the gospel as you are right, the results are limited to the people using their toolbar, but it seems to be close enough for government work most of the time.

What I did when first researching my competitors via Alexa was to get their advertising media kits which contained page impression stats. When my traffic compared relatively to their traffic, the alex rank was very similar. Then I did a huge SEO push my Alexa rank moved proportionately as my traffic increased, more SEO work and alexa followed.

Would I use it as gospel on competitive traffic analysis? No.

Would I use it to promote my advertising sales agains competitors? Yes, and I do :)

[Wlauzon]

Alexa has some useful data, but accuracy is not much for the less popular sites - under 5k or so.

It depends solely on who has the bar installed, so some types of sites tend to get hit a lot more.

A while back I installed the Alexa bar and repeatedly hit one of our websites over and over for about 4 days. It went from around #300k to around #49k. That is why you cannot really trust the numbers for lower ranking sites - if I can do that with maybe 6-8 hours of spamming, someone really dedicated could get Alexa rankings way up for a site.

[incrediBILL]

Which is exactly why I don't have the toolbar installed.

I know I access my site many times and I would definitely skew my own results.