Tell me about Alexa

Alexa.com ranks traffic on websites.

Some of the stats are looking pretty fishy to me, so I',m starting to wonder.

Are they an industry standard, or some fringe thing? Who is the industry standard in traffic rating?

Is this an independent rating site, or do they have special interests/ influences?

Who owns them?

Are their rankings influenced by fees/ memberships/ or anything else?

Can you move up the ranks by subscribing or paying a fee (like in the search engines)?

Is it a legit comparison from one site to another?

I'm in the Top 11 Million!! Woo-Hoo!! http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/drhess.net

In my opinion, it's crap. A lot of people point to it as some sort of indicator, but that doesn't mean it's not crap.

From what I understand, it aggregates data from people using the Alexa toolbar--which is pretty much nobody--and attempts to extrapolate data from that. In a sense, it's kind of like Nielsen ratings, except the data gathering process is no good.

Savvy surfers are the last ones to install some crap Alexa toolbar on their browser, so it over-reports really mainstream sites and under-reports specialty sites. And anyone who's not using IE or FIrefox can't install the toolbar, further skewing results.

I've looked at what they report against site stats on quite a few sites, and can't find much of any correlation with reality.

It MAY be useful for comparing one site to another, since they're both being reported funky, but I wouldn't even trust it for that.

You are kind of hitting on what I was noticing.

But I've also noticed them giving higher "traffic rankings" to a site with significantly less traffic for no apparent reason.

Is there a similar tool that works?

Yeah, it all depends on where the people with the toolbar are going, and they're such a small subset, it can get really weird.

I don't really know of any such tools that I trust. About the closest would be the "benchmark" tool in Google Analytics, but even it's kinda weird. At least you get good site stats out of it, though.

But in a nutshell, don't worry about it. How well the other guy is doing doesn't matter nearly as much as how well you're doing. There's a lot of good tools to measure both your own site traffic, and overall web trends (not which sites, but general user trends)

Such as....?

You want to be tracking your own site numbers and watching the trends carefully... Not just # of visitors, but what they're doing, how often they come back, all of that.

Google Analytics is very good, free, and is very easy to setup, but it can be a little overwhelming.

Mint is also good, and much easier to use. IIt requires a little more setup, and it costs like $30 bucks or something.

Send me an email and I'll send you some links to some general web trends and other tools.

Great. Thanks!

Email sent.

+1 on Google Analytics...the biggest problem with Alexa is that it relies on malware to be installed on PCs in order to collect data, and not all PCs are infected with the malware.

malware??

"Toolbar" is a nice word for it. IMO it's malware, no doubt about it.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=alexa+malware&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=

AV apps detect it as malware or at least a "privacy risk."