Alexa question

[elimoon]

Hi,

I went on alexa today and clicked on a "mover & shakers" link on the left hand side of the screen. The link is "Privacyforums.com", moving up "2000%" and positioning number 40,293 (which is very good). On this website I was surprised to see a page rank of only 1/10 so did a search on google. I was then even more surprised to see that the site had only 18 results.
How comes that this website is so well positioned without having a very high number of links?

Thanks

[flood6]

Visable PR and visible backlinks are only updated once every 3 to 6 weeks. But the benefit of inbound links and PR may be seen immediately in the SERPs once a new inbound link is found, maybe not; there seems to be some debate about this.

Google does not show all backward links when checked, only a sample.

So an increase of 2000% suggests that no one was going to that site and now they are getting loads of traffic.

This traffic does not necessarily have to come from a SE. They could have been featured on "Good Morning America", launched a large ad campaign, or bought a fortune in AdWords, who knows.

Also Alexa rankings are notorious for their ability to be manipulated. You can't put too much faith in their results.

[bhartzer]

As I understand, the Alexa data is mostly taken from people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. It's actually not an indication of the traffic on the internet.

There has also been cases where people have purposely used bots to influence their Alexa ranking, so I really don't put much weight in their rankings.

[cbp]

For more on how dodgey Alexa is, see these 2 threads:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=17660
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=22579

CBP

[netbaldwin]

I'm almost 100% positive that bhartzer is correct. The rankings come from users with their toolbar installed.

[Dave Hawley]

I wouldn't even bother using Alexa ranking, it's nothing more than a gimmick. The data is only from those that have the Alexa toolbar installed and are using it. It's something like < 5% of total internet users.

[cbp]

It's something like < 5% of total internet users

There is nothing wrong with using a sample of that size if its randomly selected (that what margins of error and confidence intervals are for).

The real problem with the Alexa sample is that it is not random (ie its self selected) and its biased (ie more likely to be technically orientated peson using it) --> Alexa user don't really represent the "average" www user.

The other obvious problem (discussed in the theads linked above) is how easy it is to manipulate.

So combine the bias sample and the easy manipulation --> its crap.

CBP

[Dave Hawley]

Any sample that uses such a small %, random, or not, is not very meaningful in my book.

[pedstersplanet]

Originally Posted by Dave Hawley

I wouldn't even bother using Alexa ranking, it's nothing more than a gimmick.

Which all me programs alert me it has spyware, so they delete it......