Many clients of mine try to evaluate their website by using Alexa Ranking. Unfortunately (in many cases fortunately), Alexa Rankings does not properly evaluate a website’s popularity and traffic.
The reason is that Alexa ranks websites based on information collected from users of Alexa Toolbar. However, the company does not provide information how many people actually use the Alexa Toolbar. According to an official statement, by 2005 there had been over 10 million downloads of the Alexa toolbar. But Alexa does not provide details how many of toolbars are actually used.
Alexa’s stats come from people who install the Alexa toolbar, and an important fact is that the majority of people who do that are webmasters and online marketers. Regular users of Internet do not know even about an existence of Alexa.
Wiki about Alexa: “Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and website. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the website where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company’s web traffic reporting.”
