Why Alexa Rating Is Not Reliable

[ViperDove]

Some people place so much trust on Alexa rating and it seems like they’re not aware that it is not very reliable. This is because the rating is based on people using the Alexa toolbar. So if 100 people visit your site and only 30 has Alexa tool bar installed, the rating will be based on the 30 visits.


Also, only some category of people has the toolbar installed because they need the information it provide. This category of people involves webmasters, bloggers, webdesigners, programmers and so on. So sites related to these categories will likely have lower Alexa rating than other sites. The rating is a good estimate of traffic, but it is not reliable and accurate. So you shouldn’t judge a site base on the Alexa rating.

 

[OhioTom76]

It's kind of like pooling a group of 35-60 year old female widows with a blood type of O who's last name starts with R. Well OK, that's a bit extreme, but yes - their data set is limited and not really varied. They don't have much demographic data on their users, unlike Google or Bing who do. You're better off learning from the performance of your display campaigns on Google to be honest, than going off of Alexa data.

 

[rohit21]

Alexa ranking system id based on the level of traffic each web site get from the people who visit a web site with Alexa toolbar installed.

 

[penny101]

I didn't realise Alexa worked like that and l think it's an unfair way of assessing website traffic, so basically you have to have there tool bar for visits to count. Alexa rates millions of websites and the only websites they will put to the top is the ones with the Alexa toolbar being used, unfair l say.

 

[Trista]

For the site owner, the Alexa data doesn't have much value for all the reasons others have stated on this thread. An inaccurate ranking of your site as compared to other sites is pretty much all that Alexa would offer you. That's not very useful.

As far as the traffic that you're getting to your site, it's much better to rely on Google Analytics -- you can look at the trends and patterns of the growth of your Web traffic. That's what really matters, after all; how many visitors you are getting to your site and how they are finding the site.