Alexa is widely tooted as a must use tool by many marketing gurus. The problems with Alexa are:
- Alexa does not get much direct traffic and has a limited reach with it's toolbar
- a small change in site visitors can represent a huge change in Alexa rating
- Alexa is biased toward webmaster traffic
- many times new webmasters are only tracking themselves visiting their own site
Why do many marketing hucksters heavily promote Alexa? Usually one of the following reasons:
- ignorance
- if you install the Alexa toolbar and then watch your own Alexa rating quickly rise as you surf your own site it is easy for me to tell you that you are learning quickly and seeing great results, thus it is easy to sell my customers results as being some of the best on the market
- if many people who visit my site about marketing install the Alexa toolbar then my Alexa rating would go exceptionally high
- the marketers may associate their own rise in success with their increasing Alexa ranking although it happens to be more of a coincidence than a direct correlation
A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.
Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic. It is also hard to compare sites in different industries. For example, if I created a site about weight loss there would be many more people searching for it than a site about knitting. Also, you should't forget the webmaster bias the tool has, which means my site will have a higher Alexa rating than it should.
