Alexa -The worst bullshit on the net?

[Somtam]

Hello,

I'm just curious about the Alexa rankings..They're total bullshit aren't they?
My site tonight had about 10 visitors from Google...And my site's ranking as number 24-thousand-something on Alexa!! I do rank very high for tons of low-traffic keywords and around 30-40 for a couple of high-traffic keywords, but what the h**l???

To me it seems like their rankings are not even an indication on how the web sites are doing...But then again I could be wrong of course, since I don't know anything about Alexa.

Anyway, just think it's fun and interesting to know. Anyone who knows about this?

Regards,
Trond.

[rizla]

the alexa rank is just a reflection of alexa's users - I have a site which no one knows and it's open for 2 weeks with an alexa browser - it jumped from nothing to around 400,000 in just few days and from 1 user activity...

[Somtam]

hi Rizla,

That doesn't sound like a very exact measurement no. I thought maybe it could be used to something good, but probably not. At work we often have other sites contacting us and wants us to do marketing on their sites, so I thought maybe I could use it as a screening thing to roughly see if it could pay off or not, but I guess it's not a good enough tool for that. Better do it the hard way :(

I've never heard neither bad nor good about Alexa before, but when I saw how my own site ranked I kind of got an idea...

Regards,
Trond.

[rizla]

my main conclusion from all of these ranking hunt is to follow ctr and traffic deltas,
I keep on with what works best...

[eCommando]

I seems like Alexa count hits, not unique visitors. So if you have their tool bar installed, and visits your site during development you are getting hits.

[seo_sensey]

Never bothered to measure anything with Alexa's tools.
I get thousands of hits from their crawler but that's all ... I'm thinking to block it through robots.txt if it goes far enough to burn much of my BW.

[rizla]

a look on alexa's top 500 reveals lots of anonymous sites...

[Somtam]

Heh, it definately seems like I was correct in my assupmtions yes :)

I've now found out that the best way to get a good Alexa ranking is simply to remove your web sites a few days! My web server's been down for 3 days(I was extremely unlucky in my choice of server!!!), but my Alexa rankings just climb and climb every day! lol! I'm now ranked as 40,000-something, haha!

Trond