What does alexa measure?

[carlomrx]

greetings everyone,

i have yet another question for you. Can anyone tell me what the alexa numbers really mean? and are they accurate?

I checked my site and it gave it a ranking of close to 3 million. To get an idea of what that meant, I then checked four other related sites that all send me traffic. These are sites that I know have to be generating a lot more traffic than mine because of the traffic they send me through simple text links. However, these sites were all given a ranking well under 10k, which doesn't seem to make sense.

Can anyone shed any light on this for me?

As always, I am grateful for your great advice.

 

[Stouch]

Its a law unto itself and easy to manipulate.

It is a measure of how many times people with the toolbar installed have visited a URL, and it being logged.

 

[RON2]

The number is a simple ranking of the top 4,000,000 sites visited by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed.

Yahoo has an Alexa rating of "1" meaning it's the number 1 most visited site. DNForum is rated around 5,200. If your site is rated over 3,000,000 then the traffic is probably pretty low. 10K ratings are very good.

 

[carlomrx]

Aha! Once again RJ, you have cleared it all up for me. Thanks! The help section on alexa is not that great and i was totally baffled by it. Thanks again!