Is alexa.com accurate?

i know for a fact it isn't at all.

i just started a site and it is an adult site. when my site came out three weeks ago alexa.com moved it up in the rankings for 18 days by a huge amount and then it started going in the opposite direction...well that was when my programmers went on vacation who all use the toolbar and work on my site.

i track my own traffic to my site... my traffic is up like crazy since my programmers went on vacation. maybe 1000% from when they left for the holidays

it is simply that the people who use porn sites aren't the type of people with the alexa toolbar. The people who use sitepoint.com or cnn.com are the types who use alexa toolbar. Alexa guesstimates at a certain point.

Freeones.com users and megarotic.com users don't have the toolbar as a percentage to justify their rating, but alexa knows that these sites have huge traffic so they slot them in based on what the site is worth.

i would like a toolbar that ranks what sites are worth in dollars.

No here goes an article from an expert. I hope this helps.

Why Alexa Is Worthless written by John Chow

Alexa is a tool that many webmasters and advertisers used to gauge the size of a website. The Alexa ranking is based on a three month running average. The number shown is where a site ranks on the internet. For example, The TechZone has a ranking of 23,005. This mean the site is the 23,005th biggest on the Internet. Out of the billions of the sites on the net, being in the top 23,000 is pretty good, right? The only problem with the Alexa ranking is it is worthless.

The main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If you do not have the toolbar running, you do not affect the rankings of the sites you visit. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to cheat the system. Just get a few friends to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday. It does not take many people to break into the top 100,000. You can even do it all by yourself by refreshing your site over and over again. Get a dozen friends to do it and youâ€™re break into top 20,000 easily.

When requesting review samples for The TechZone, I have never had a hardware vendor asked me for the siteâ€™s Alexa ranking but I have heard from many smaller tech sites that have. I get the feeling that is the vendorâ€™s way of denying a hardware request. They would look at the siteâ€™s Alexa ranking (say itâ€™s 60,000) and then reply â€œSorry we can only send review samples to sites with a 50,000 Alexa ranking or better.â€ At least I hope this is the true reason they use Alexa - as an excuse. I would hate to think a PR rep would base his/her decision to send a product on a siteâ€™s Alexa ranking.

The biggest users of the Alexa ranking are ad sales networks. They use the ranking to get a higher price from advertisers. For example, Text Link Ads (TLA) base part of its link pricing on a siteâ€™s Alexa ranking â€“ the better your rank, the more money you can command. Adbrite does the same thing. If this is the case, then John Chow dot Com should command a lot of money for a link in the next few weeks. Why you ask? Take a look at its Alexa ranking.

Now I realize I received a ton of visitors in the past few days, but I know for a fact that it did not came remotely close to the traffic level of AnandTech. Yet, there you have it â€“ a traffic graph showing I blew right past them.

I guess I should use this to my advantage. Text links for sales! Get linked by a top 1000 Alexa ranked blog! Only $1,000 a month! Anyone still think the Alexa ranking is worth anything?

Imisidro's response is right on since alexa's toolbar is the tracked statistic. Outsiders to alexa.com really do not hold alexa's evaluation as valid stats for net traffic or domain name ranking.

Good luck!

NO

Alexa is not accurate as it only tracks only users that have downloaded the Alexa toolbar. The higher the ranking of the site, it gets better in providing the trend of traffic; and for ranking of 100,000 and above -- margin of error increases exponentially

However, the problem lies in the fact that many thinks Alexa shows the site's actual traffic numbers, which is definitely not

As the previous answers indicated, Alexa is a flawed barometer of your traffic. The primary use is to compare other sites. Even then the rankings may not be accurate but if one site is ranked 600,000 and another site is 2 million, it's probably valid that the 600,000 ranking is a result of more traffic.

Alexa is really a joke, don't pay attention to those stats

Hi Adam,

Short answer - no...Alexa is not accurate, particularly from an ecommerce point of view. Alexa can have it's advantages in certain areas however, but for your purposes right now, spend your time on other metrics methods and forget Alexa.

You mentioned you are monitoring your own traffic. Are you tracking using server log files or are you using an analytics sofrware? From a professional standpoint, I am very curious to understand why your traffic is up as it relates to your programmers not being around.

I run a web marketing company and we do a lot of analytics work, if you would like me to take a look at your analysis results, I can give you some free advice on your traffic patterns.

Email me : info@geminimediasolutions.com and I can give you my thoughts.

Cheers!

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