So how accurate is Alexa?

[MorgUK]

We've been watching our performance on Alexa for a while and recently it's got a lot better. Who else here uses Alexa and what do you think of it? Does anyone pay for the full membership?

I think Alexa, PR and MozRank are pretty good ways to track your performance but I guess like anything, always take them with a pinch of salt...

 

[OhioTom76]

I don't really place much credence in Alexa, since it's data is all derived from people who have their toolbar installed. The type of people who would have that installed probably aren't very tech savvy if I had to take a guess. Not to mention its a limited data set overall.

 

[MorgUK]

Yeah it's strange, because it's such an unfair system, yet everyone I know uses it to judge a website. I'm trying to get a good rank on it just for a personal experiment, but I guess I should focus more on link building and real SEO.

 

[Trista]

I think it's unclear as to the "absolute" accuracy of Alexa these days, in terms of what percentage of the total number of people surfing the Internet have the toolbar installed and are thus part of the data pool. But that said, I do find Alexa a useful and quick benchmark to gauge the traffic I'm getting to my Web sites on a given day, as well as looking back historically.

The most useful data for SEO purposes, of course, would come from Google Analytics.

 

[ViperDove]

I made a post here: Why Alexa Rating Is Not Reliable. There, I explained that the data from Alexa is based on people who use the Alexa toolbar. There are millions of people who doesn't use the toolbar and so it is not that accurate.

 

[MorgUK]

I made a post here: Why Alexa Rating Is Not Reliable. There, I explained that the data from Alexa is based on people who use the Alexa toolbar. There are millions of people who doesn't use the toolbar and so it is not that accurate.

Yeah i fully agree, yet when people look for stats on a website, Alexa is one of the first to come up. I think Alexa will get bigger, I just wish the toolbar was built into browsers or something.

 

[jessman]

People that are wanting to sell their websites may be inflating their Alexa statistics over a period of time just to raise the value of the site purchase. It's very easy. Just purchase lots of traffic from different sources. Those junk traffic and they will inflate the Alexa rating like mad. So it depends. If the owner is savvy, Alexa can be very unreliable.

 

[wowtgp]

Although the data is not accurate, a lot of advertisers use it as a basis to assess our sites.

 

[Foxbeard]

I agree with OhioTom76 it's only for users of the alexa toolbar. You can actually help your ranking by adding the toolbar itself. lol

 

[wowtgp]

I agree with OhioTom76 it's only for users of the alexa toolbar. You can actually help your ranking by adding the toolbar itself. lol

It doesn't matter that much though, but advertisers tend to look at Alexa rankings.

 

[MorgUK]

I wonder if it's worth building up amazing Alexa rankings and then sell the site showing the stats?

 

[James]

It's very, very unaccurate. I have some websites that have over double the traffic as other ones, but have a lower alexa rank.

In my opinion, niche has a very large effect on this. As others have said, Alexa can only track users using the toolbar - so technier niches tend to have audiences with a larger percentage of people having the toolbar installed, resulting in a lower alexa rank with the same amount (or more) traffic.