Just a question for you experts out there.

How important are Alexa rankings to a website?

And if they are important, why? And if they're not, why not?

Personally, I don't understand why people care about Alexa rankings so perhaps somebody can enlighten me also!

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Gloyns SEO
Perfume - Online Perfume Store (WIP!)

Alexa rankings are a very poor way to determine value for a site as they only use a very rough average using only those who have the Alexa tool bar on your website.

A great post recently which shows how innaccurate these "web traffic tools" are can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/testing-a...ends-quantcast

Example here of how people can easily fake your Alexa score:

http://calacanis.com/2006/11/24/alex...-as-three-mac/

Story in the end do not really take them as been important.

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Yep don't waste your time looking at Alexa. If you want accurate data then you need to use something like Hitwise

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Index > Rank > Monetise

It can be good for the ego if you have a good score that you know was earned without any tricks. A bit like toolbar PR in that sense.

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SMSF

Alexa can be great as a comparison tool between sites that are very popular in order to track rise and fall of their popularity. Some good examples are Digg VS Reddit and how much traffic sites like EzineArticles have lost due to Panda. Interesting data but it's not something I care about in regards to my own sites or would consider when purchasing another.

What makes this a good tool ??

Why is their data better i wonder

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Dieters.Tv + Speculate.Tv | Blonde |World News
Business Show | 3DTV |888tvcn
Electric Guitars | Acoustic Guitars|Video Real Estate
A world of .........video sites

They collect their data directly from ISPs rather than relying on a browser plugin

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Index > Rank > Monetise

I did have a quick look and thought it was interesting they report on youtube stats

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Dieters.Tv + Speculate.Tv | Blonde |World News
Business Show | 3DTV |888tvcn
Electric Guitars | Acoustic Guitars|Video Real Estate
A world of .........video sites

ditto to pretty much everything that's been said

when i started my first job everyone was impressed that i had managed to get their alexa ranking to skyrocket within a couple of weeks, nevermind the fact genuine traffic hadn't changed. Figured out pretty quickly it was just cos I was hitting the site so often with the plugin