Alexa.com - why is it so important

[AndysWeb]

Hi all,

Can some of you chaps and chapettes tell me why Alexa.com is so important, I have done a lot of research and it is conflicting..

Thank you

Andy

[innagle]

Hi Andy,

I imagine it's important because it has become an authority - and it has become an authority because it is the best known of it's kind (I actually do not know other), it is easy to use, and everybody can interprete the numbers.
If two people can't decide what is better - google or yahoo - then at least they can see which has the better numbers. Easy, though statistics is never more than half of the truth :-)

Cheers,
Bjarne

[Best Five TV]

Alexa only captures data from those who have the Alexa tool bar installed on their pc therefore their stats are not worth looking at and can be easily manipulated in order to gain a higher traffic rank.

[Arleigh]

I actually don't much focus on increasing my rankings in Alexa, I just concentrate more on google because most of my traffic came from it.

[fisicx]

Arleigh - Alexa isn't a search engine, it's a web information service. Don't confuse alexa ranking with SE ranking - they are not the same animal.

About the Alexa Traffic Rankings

[Alby]

Alexa is worth much IMO because it has a limited base, only those with the relevant plugin count. It might work for certain industries, such as gaming etc

[proson]

alexa is NOT so important. the data is NOT accurate, it's only a reference
as someone pointed out ONLY people installed the alexa tool bar will
count... so you've got some idea on how much traffic you've got but I think
concentrate on daily average Page views of your website probably is a much better factor that you should concern.

[dsouza]

i have not yet understood on what basis Alexa tool bar shows the results

[simonr]

I know I'm stating the obvious here but if (and it's a biiiig if!) the people how have the necessary toolbar are representitive of the wider web-using population then the statistics will at least have a *relative* validity.

Do we know anything about who loads the toolbar?

S

[Alby]

The difficulty with Alexa, is that you need to have the relevant plugin to register your visit, therefore it tends to give a skewed view of the sites worth