Alexa rankings are completely unreliable, except few top-ranking sites.
Yet people are trying to cash on them every day. It sounds great to have a website that is in TOP 200.000 worldwide, available for a modest price. What’s wrong with such offers is that all that’s necessary is your own traffic to achieve that. Of course, the entrepreneurial minds behind offers stressing Alexa ranking sometimes followed by few exclamation marks, will usually omit to mention this rather important fact (that 90% of their traffic is them visiting every few hours).
I’m visiting a very niche portal every few days. They are around the rank of 500.000. Great ranking for a place that covers an extremely niche topic that is of interest to only few people.
I have just found that according to Alexa, I alone represent 50% of their traffic (I know because there are no other visitors from my country, completely sure about that). Now I rarely visit daily for a longer timespan, it’s usually once or twice per week. Most other users visit more frequently.
Funny thing is, while many still don’t know how easily Alexa rankings can be pumped up (there were some news going around months ago that it’s not that easy anymore, well - it’s still is), there are many that know it well.
A well known Alexa toolbar tool for Firefox, SearchStatus, had this note on their site:
“please upgrade to the latest version to avoid losing alexa rankings”
Clear and self-explanatory.
July 25th, 2007 at 4:07 am
I agree.
I find Alexa more of a gimmick, than a true bearing of how well a website is doing.
For instance, I have noticed Alexa trending downwards heavily for my site (it was at 6,000 and is now 16,000 and moving towards the 25,000-30,000 mark) despite the fact that unique traffic has nearly doubled since the period where I was 6,000.
I used to believe that Alexa could be taken as an accurate reflection of “webmaster” traffic (i.e. those that are more likely to use the toolbar because they are aware of it, and what to increase their own sites by using it) - but given that my site is heavily centred around webmaster activity, and is heading downwards instead of upwards, whilst traffic is increasing… I can only conclude that is not accurate at all - for any type of traffic.
I still think Alexa is an interesting idea, but the results they offer shouldn’t be taken with a lot of seriousness.