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Alexa ranking

soj

Founder
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?
 

Gloyns

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

James

Top Contributor
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-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast

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

http://calacanis.com/2006/11/24/alexa-is-100-wrong-and-you-can-game-it-with-as-few-as-three-mac/

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

Shane

Top Contributor
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.
 

payattention

Archived Member
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.

 

joe

Top Contributor
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 :)
 

James

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

Hitwise itself is not that accurate either, yet it is more accurate then the tools in questions.

Reason been Hitwise take data from independent ISP's they do not have access to large ISP's such as Optus and Telstra to gather data so in fact you get a far smaller sample size on the Australian market.

That been said you can gain good insights from the tool.
 

xwdomains

Top Contributor
I do look at alexa rankings as it can also show what keywords other sites countries etc are driving traffic to a particular site, I have seen many people claiming they have got thousands of unique visitors but the alexa tells a different story however it easy enough to fake alexa but this is easily picked out by country traffic referring sites.

Quite a few buyers won't buy a site that has a bad alexa rank, a good alexa can be the difference between the site selling for $xxx-$xxxxx.
 

James

Top Contributor
I do look at alexa rankings as it can also show what keywords other sites countries etc are driving traffic to a particular site, I have seen many people claiming they have got thousands of unique visitors but the alexa tells a different story however it easy enough to fake alexa but this is easily picked out by country traffic referring sites.

Quite a few buyers won't buy a site that has a bad alexa rank, a good alexa can be the difference between the site selling for $xxx-$xxxxx.

Thing is you can have a website which a young demographic and say 12-18 and no one will have an alexa tool bar, so the site may have 100k visitors a month and a very high alexa. I have seen this happen with my own sites.

You can then have a webmaster site with all the webmasters having alexa tool bar, you can get 1k visitors and have a good alexa.

If people buy based on Alexa, then that is worrying.
 

DavidL

Top Contributor
I think Hitwise monitor 3m users so it's a decent sample. We used it for years and got a lot of value out of it.
 

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