How important is Alexa?

[citypublife]

I would be interested to know how the professionals value Alexa rankings.

In theory it seems to be a good idea and (if accurate) a valuable resource. But:-

• Is it accurate?
  Is it realistic?
  Is it a valuable indication of how popular your websites really are?
  Does anybody know the secrets behind their algorithm?
  How many websites does it measure? (I've heard 16.6 million).
  How many times a month do you check your ranking?
  Rating 1 for not important and 10 for very important. - How important is their ranking to you?

Many thanks for your replies.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[fathom]

There is some useful information there, but also a severe bias.

[citypublife]

Fathom

Biased? for/against what?
What information is "useful"?
If some information is viable. Why did you vote a resounding no... Please elaborate.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[Runawayrentals]

I honestly find it quite horrid. I really hope those stats arent used for anything more then the graphics Alexa sets up. I have found that buy installing alexa toolbar you can alter your own rankings. Its not pretty. I tried that months ago and worked took my rankings form 90K area to 40K area in 2 weeks. I got rid of it and havent been back. It no longer even intrigues me. Especially since on one site you can tell the employees have it install, as it tells you what pages/sections are viewed most and its /admin/ so I tried to view it and you must login for that section yet the entire site is a no-login site... That site has a rank of about 2500.

[Jamie]

I do not think it is very meaningful . For a short period of time I was using one of the smaller pay per click programs that advertised on Alexa. My site was only 2 months old and I was under 50k when I stopped the advertising I went up to 200k.
Jamie

[citypublife]

Runawayrentals "...Especially since on one site you can tell the employees have it install, as it tells you what pages/sections are viewed most and its /admin/ so I tried to view it and you must login for that section yet the entire site is a no-login site... That site has a rank of about 2500."

Please explain the above quote. It doesn't make sense. Thanks.

www.citypublife.co.uk

[DylanW]

It's essentially biased towards people who have Alexa installed. I'm not exactly sure what group this would be, but I'm assuming it's at least in part webmasters, since it's got a lot of stats, which can be helpful to webmasters.

I downloaded it quite some time ago after reading an article about it. I haven't gotten rid of it, just because I haven't really thought about it much (lots of other stuff to worry about :)). It's probably good as a spot-check for how you're doing traffic-wise, but, as has been said before, if you keep it installed you're likely to get some inflated stats (you're going to be going back to your own site a lot, especially if you've got it as your home page, as I do at work).

Our site is continually in the 60k range in terms of rank. I can't remember how high it was when I first installed Alexa, but it seems like it's gone up a few 10k in rank. Part of this may be natural, but then again part of this may be because it's installed.

As for overall usefulness, I don't think it does that much, except in the way of curiosity. You can check reviews, if anyone writes them. You can get a Traffic Rank stat, but as I said, that's a rough estimate and can be inflated. You can also get a Backlink count, but it's nothing you can't get on Google or several other search engines.

My vote: Undecided.

[Runawayrentals]

citypublife....

Let see if I can make this more clear....

On Alexa, they have a section under this sites "stats" that shows what are the heaviest hit pages by those who are giving Alexa ranking, those pages are administrative pages, only accessible by webmaster and or others who are working on ths site. It is the #1 viewed pages out of 5 sections listed. Which with the webmasters, administrative people using the tool bar, has gotten them a very very low ranking in the 2-3K rank.

Hope this was clear enough.

[fathom]

Runawayrentals has the right idea, the tool bar (client side) and the alexa banner/search box on server side (site).

Sites with search/banner boxes are categorically rated "higher" even if they only have a few visitors per day, and a site that get 10,000 a day visitors can be rated low (below 1 million) if no alexa banner/search box and few toolbars are used by visitors.

Useful info - generally speaking industry competitors often have similar markets therefore a competitor site rated higher than your is likely getting more visitation and a site rated lower is likely getting less (margin of error unknown).

But data is not uniform across all industries and markets e.g. WPW rank is low at 4600 with 11,000 members, SEOChat with 2,200 (and alot less daily posts) is at 1100.

Whereas a site I manage in earth science/education is still at 211,000 rating and 8-10K visitation a day.

A little bogus IMO.

[OldKentucky]

Alexa is incredibly biased if you are dependent on it of stats. Judging that Alexa=webmasters and Amazon buyers, that alienates a good percentage of the web.

Its site rankings may be useful, but I wouldn't bet the farm on them.