Alexa Toolbar: Can You Depend on It?

If you are a web savvy individual then you already know what the Alexa toolbar is about. Many people regard it as a piece of crap, unrealistic stats, and well the list goes on. Personally I agree with most, the Alexa toolbar is a biased toolbar and so are it's stats.

If you are new to Alexa and don't quite understand it, here is my breakdown of it. Alexa is the baby of Amazon.com, and provides information on the traffic levels for all the websites that exist. Here is what makes it biased, the Alexa rank is calculated by the amount of users who have the toolbar installed and decide to visit a particular site.

Many webmasters and bloggers start to concentrate on getting their Alexa rank in the low 100,000 because it shows to the many uneducated advertisers who visit your site that you must be receiving a tangible amount of traffic. Which is not always true. I've heard many site owners say they got their site to the low 100,000's yet they have less then a 100 visitors a month. Honestly I've played with the Alexa toolbar myself with one of my blogs that at the time was brand new. Within 2 months I got my Alexa rank to go from 10,230,091 to 152,115, how unreal is that? I ended up taking the toolbar out and now my blog ranks at 1,254,321 but is a page rank of 3 with Google. Now that is a lot more realistic don't you think.

I can see why a person who has the toolbar installed can drastically affect their ranking. Alexa collects all information about what sites you visit and they have no idea that it is "you". They look at you as a anonymous visitor. So you can repeatedly refresh your site with the Alexa toolbar installed and within months your rank will be in the low 100,000's. Also for every toolbar user that visits a page Alexa assumes that 9 other non-Alexa toolbar users have visited the page as well. So for every 100 toolbar visitors Alexa assumes 900 non-toolbar users are also visiting the page with a 24 hour time frame.

Pros

In the marketing world, advertisers only look at your Google page rank and yes unfortunately your Alexa rank. If you have a high page rank and low numbers in Alexa you are bound to receive substantial advertisement offers for your site.

Alexa toolbar also helps if you are in the process of finding good links. The Alexa toolbar not only shows its ranking but also shows the Google page rank for each site you visit. This way you can easily weed out the more credible sites from the ones who are not favored by Google at the moment.

Cons

Not everyone has the toolbar installed, so that greatly affects a sites ranking. A site with hundreds of page views a day can be ranked in the high numbers while a site with maybe 30 page views a month is in the lower number, just because they have the toolbar installed.

Not a lot of web savvy people give the Alexa much credibility because they believe that it can be very easily gamed.

Regardless of how we all feel about Alexa the cold harsh truth is that advertisers depend on your Alexa ranking to determine if they want to bid on a advertising spot on your site. Although I still don't understand why they depend on Alexa when there are so many factors to consider before determining the popularity of a site, I can understand why many still love and admire Alexa. Plain and simple it helps them make money.

Source- personal experience
www.webmasterworld.com