Comments on: Thoughts on Alexa data

By: Robert Worthington

Robert Worthington — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:17:02 +0000

I actually thought Alexa had some value. Shows how little I know of seo.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:39:47 +0000

Hi..good article here..indeed Alexa is not showing a 100% real data but i think is doing a good job,ranking our stuff on the web market.
This is just my opinion.

By: David Lange

David Lange — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:15:10 +0000

Alexa data is at best good for visualizing the broad-range traffic pattern on a website. Its traffic volume is totally unreliable.

By: Jade @ No Longer 25

Jade @ No Longer 25 — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:03:54 +0000

Until I got my own domain this month I had never heard of Alexa. Now I have the tool bar and the button on my site but before that I didn’t have a clue. I feel like the numbers don’t give a full representation but they seem to be important if you want to advertise so we have to do it their way. There’s also a bit of satisfaction when moving up the rankings! I’m still unrated, not sure how long it takes.
Jade

By: John

John — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:57:40 +0000

Both Alexis Ranking and Google page rank are entirely worthless. The only value either has is when ignorant people pay someone as a result of either. The only person who wins is the person who is selling the illusion. The only thing Google uses page rank for is to ding bad websites with a PR of 0. Our page rank has gone up and down from 2 to 7 and back to 3, yet our sales has continued to rise and our search engine placement has never changed by more than 1 or 2 placements for our important keywords. We have seem other sites rise up in Google quickly and then months later just disappear, as Google constantly gets smarter to the tricks.

By: Jennifer White

Jennifer White — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:11:52 +0000

I agree with the comment above about the plugin in Firefox. Alexa is useful
for the quick graphical indication on the browser. Other than that I also
find that their data is out of date and often off by orders of magnitude.
OK tool, but not as good as it could be.

By: Tuke

Tuke — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:48:16 +0000

When it comes to alexa you have to be careful not to just take the numbers as is just like with any other statistic.

First anything that has a rank number of 100K or higher (as in 200K not 10K) is about as accurate as blind person taking a shot after being spun around a few times.

Now as for the ones between 1 and -100K? you have to compare LIKE sites to get any meaning thus comparing ask.com with mattcutts.com on alexa is about as useful as comparing a freeway to a country. This is for the obvious reasons of skewness which many users here have pointed out already. Finally if the numbers on the sites you are comparing feel wrong then maybe it is because one of them is using techniques to ramp up their ranking, thus any ranking on site you suspect is doing that is meaningless and you should ignore it.

As for the government (.gov) sites having a declining reach, think of it this way. All the time more users are coming online in the world. Most of those new users today are not in US as the penetration of internet in US is relatively high compared to the rest of the world. The users who use the internet from those other countries are not generally speaking as interested in any information on us government sites as US citizens, thus the more of the world comes online the less the reach of the .gov sites should be.

I am a technical person and I do give alexa ranking some value as it gives me an easy way to see how my competition is doing compared to me, but I always apply the principals above before just going “oh my gowd this site is…” fill whatever you want.

By: Squeaky

Squeaky — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:23:25 +0000

I really do not believe in Alexa stats but there are many who do. From my experience, it still seems that many consider it when purchasing a product or service from a website.
I have a large amount of my visitors which use Vista and there isn’t a Alexa toolbar doesn’t support Vista. So, my Alexa stats are not accurate at all and does have an impact on directory submissions for Madmouse.

As long as people believe in the tooth fairy, people will still believe in Alexa..

By: Werner

Werner — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:54:21 +0000

How important is Alexa?
In Germany, Alexa is not so well known,
How important do you think the Alexa rank really?
Greetings from Germany
Werner

By: David

David — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:53:06 +0000

I help manage a government website http://www.govbenefits.gov – we’ve seen our site traffic decline over the past two years which is consistent with the “Reach” data I see on Alexa, I’m wondering from the group if there is any sense if the “reach” data is at all accurate. Since we don’t advertise ranking is not so important. My fundamental research question is, over the past five years has there been a decline in site traffic to .gov domains? I’m having trouble find a reliable source of data to answer that question. When I put in four or five other large .gov domains like epa.gov, hhs.gov, and ssa.gov it would appear that there has been a decline in reach. Any help is greatly appreciated.