New Webmaster Protip
No one gives a damn about your Alexa ranking, and you shouldn't either. Their stats only come from people who use their toolbar. Use something like Google Analytics instead.
Written by Paul H.
1 Response
"Their stats only come from people who use their toolbar."
That is actually incorrect. I have never used the Alexa Toolbar, but when I added an unregistered domain name to my hosts file for local testing, after a few days of browsing that domain during work the domain did have an Alexa rank. It had a very high rank, in the 22,xxx,xxx range but it does prove that Alexa doesn't just use it's toolbar to collect statistics. Alexa also state on their help page they use other sources too.
http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more
"The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach)."
I do agree that Alexa rank isn't a suitable way to measure either a site's worth, traffic, or statistics, as after all it can easily be manipulated, but it does depend on certain conditions. I would only consider Alexa a suitable source of statistics for websites within the 10,xxx range. Below the 1xx range and you're really getting accurate.
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