Alexa ranking

[BillTodd]

What is the improtant of alexa rank?. Is this really help on SEO?. I am just curious, everyone is talking about their page rank.

[TWD_Tony]

Alexa rank isn't page rank (PR)

Alexa rank is just a (badly) estimate of your web traffic, where as PR refers to Google PageRank. This PageRank is a numeric value (out of 10) that Google gives to website's based on probably thousands of different factors.
If you want to see a website's PR then go to Google.com and download the toolbar (it stops pop-ups too!) Everytime you visit a site it's PR is automatically displayed in the toolbar.

[WebHost Admin]

Alexa traffic stats are generated by people surfing with the Alexa toolbar. From my experience, this will generally be webmasters, so the results are pretty skewed.

For example, I had an interfaith site pulling in nearly 50,000 uniques per month, but its Alexa traffic ranking was only around 400,000. Meanwhile, a webmaster site I had at the time pulling in around 8,000 uniques per month had a ranking of around 70,000 in Alexa.

Google PageRank is a different value entirely, and applies to a general scoring based on how many links from different websites are pointing at a target site. It's *not* a measure of how well a page or domain is ranking in Google, simply a rough scale of how well linked to it is.

Hope that helps.

[webmonkey]

The only time I've noticed Alexa ranking to be important is when selling your site. There is a certain value to know that a small sample of people do think your site is interesting and are consistant visitors. Otherwise, as stated above, you can't really get too much valuable information from it.

[StreamLine]

I'm just curious exactly how this works... Do they extrapolate the data using some sort of statistical model to base it on a normal population? Or do they just go with the sample of webmasters as being their 'normal and random' sample? Its hard to imagine such a well-known ranking not having a random sample... If not, is there a resource which has one? Is there, essentially, a Nielson rating for internet traffic?

[WebHost Admin]

So far as I'm aware, it's simply tracking stats of those who have the Alexa Toolbar installed - which is invariably webmasters, looking to boost their Alexa ranking.

I'd use it myself for that reason, actually, but the toolbar has a bug that causes problems with vbulletin, from my experience - sometimes when posting you suddenly end up with dozens of new
windows opening up simultaneously, and every time you close one, a new one opens. You simply have to wait for it to finish.

[jimberan]

I think all webmasters enjoy looking at their Alexa stats however as previously pointed out the stats are not very reliable.

[aquariancore]

Alexa was around back in 97 when I started out in this business as a young pup of 42. Back then it was just a nuisance as it weighed down the browser.

[ACCER]

I remember when Alexa came out. It wasn't very good then and I still don't like it. I took a lot of grief because we share a name. I pointed out to more than one person that if I were responsible for Alexa, it would work better.

[aquariancore]

I am amazed how many internet marketing companies are tied into it.