Alexa

[JenC]

Originally Posted by Jim

Alexa is ok for an idea but take it with a grain of salt.

Exactly. You can lower your Alexa rating just by visiting your own site. AND they give better ratings to those who have downloaded their toolbar.

[Joe]

Originally Posted by JenC

Exactly. You can lower your Alexa rating just by visiting your own site. AND they give better ratings to those who have downloaded their toolbar.

Makes sense to me.

Download Alexa toolbar, and set your website as your start page.

Watch your Alexa rating plumment.

Voila.

[Toby]

Originally Posted by JenC

...they give better ratings to those who have downloaded their toolbar.

Well, not exactly. They have no way of tying together a browser session with a specific website. The Alexa Toolbar is how they gather part of their data used to compute the rankings. It sends back data to Amazon on the sites the user visits.

Alexa ranking can be fairly easily manipulated if you don't mind burning bandwidth. But it is still useful for a number of things if you consider all of the data available and not just the raw ranking number. I find it helpful in comparing my sites with others when deciding if hardlink trades will be equitable.