Alexa Rankings

[Ross1982]

I have never really understood how Alexa Rankings work etc and need some advice

My site is currently just gone over a months old, and has a ranking of '104,100'

Is that good or bad?

 

[Vivvy]

The Alexa toolbar is the biggest most bloated piece of spyware out there... and one of the things it does is keep track of where people who use it are going. Thus, the ranking, based only on how many people visit a site who have the toolbar.

It is easily manipulated and when buying a site it isn't helpful in determining real traffic. Although it might be helpful after the sale in determining how honest or dishonest the person is that you bought the site from.

The lower the ranking, the more popular the site. I have one site that's in the 10,000's but all the rest are somwhere above 100,000 ... which doesn't mean the sites don't get very decent traffic, just that the people visiting aren't using alexa.

Vivvy

 

[Togoodhlth]

I Agree with Vivvy.

When a visitor has the alexa toolbar installed alexa tracks their Internet use and ranks sites based on the information from all users with the alexa toolbar. This is how they get their rankings.
Since many domain speculators use the toolbar a lot of the sites which speculators visit get really good alexa rankings.
Many people falsly equate a low alexa ranking with a high number of unique visitors.
I own a site that was ranked about 250,000 in alexa but was getting about 6k unqiues per day. When I started visiting the site daily as well as my programmer and designer and I started linking to the site from several DN forums my ranking went down as low as 35,000 but the traffic received no noticable change.

You'll notice places like WHT have rankings in the xxxx and that is because many with the toolbar visit these sites however there are sites which receive tons more traffic however have a far, far worse alexa rank.

So take alexa rankings with a grain of salt.

Now if you are looking at a site witha good alexa rank check outthe 1 year chart and see if there are a lot of peaks and valleys. This is a good way to see if the site has been manipulated. If the chart remains pretty constant either the person has done a fantastic job of manipulating or there is a steady stream of people with the domain toolbar visiting the site.

Hope this helped a little.

 

[GT Web]

Right, and always remember that having a ranking of 1000 is better than having a ranking of 100,000

Also remember to ALWAYS take Alexa rankings with a FEW grains of salt as Togoodhlth noted