Alexa Rankings - What a Joke

Think Alexa is a good ratings indicator - Think Again.

Many webmasters think that Alexa is a good indicator of how well your site is doing compared to another site. It may be. Alexa rankings are really only useful to compare your site with another site that has the same demographics.

Let me explain.

I have access to the log files of hundreds of sites targeting wildly different markets. If I relied on Alexa rankings alone I’d have

Think Alexa is a good ratings indicator - Think Again.

Many webmasters think that Alexa is a good indicator of how well your site is doing compared to another site. It may be. Alexa rankings are really only useful to compare your site with another site that has the same demographics.

Let me explain.

I have access to the log files of hundreds of sites targeting wildly different markets. If I relied on Alexa rankings alone I’d have a totally distorted view of which are the popular sites. For example, one site appears to be substantially popular than another site. (one site is under 40,000 in Alexa the other is ranked over 3,000,000) Yet when I use AW-Stats to compare the traffic to the site, I found that the site that appeared to hardly have any traffic actually had more than three times the traffic of the site ranked under 40,000.

Obviously people relying on Alexa to guage site popularity would have a totally distorted view. The only people I know who have Alexa toolbars installed are webmasters. I haven’t found a non-webmaster that has the toolbar on their system.

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