SEO Tycoon

**ThailandForum** · 08-17-2010, 05:19 PM

I have just read yet another post on how important alexa ranking is so I thought a thread on crap about seo was in order.

Your alexa ranking is a totally meaningless easily manipulated waste of time, it will not tell you anything, nor does it mean anything, nor does it have any influence, or anything at all in any way at all.

Well thats all that cleared up then, ahh, you want an example?

OK, I just checked my alexa ranking for one of my sites, 2.33% of visitors to my site after visiting my site come to this website, now thats around 200 of my visitors perday, now I'm sure the admin would be well impressed if I got him 200 visitors perday, hell, may even pay for a little button or banner on my site, but sadly my site has nothing to do with webmasters or anything like that at all, nor is there any links to here, nothing against webmaster talk but as I said my site has nothing to do with webmastering, so, hows that happening we may ask ourselves?

Well I'm pretty sure it is people that are from here that are obviously experts and have installed alexa's toolbar (data mining crappy thing) and obviously returning here, obviously as most people in the world have never heard of alexa or its toolbar they have no reason to install it, so lets say 1 in 5,000 people use it, you open a forum, get 5 moderators, they install the toolbar, you can now emulate an alexa ranking of having 25,000 visitors perday, WOW, now your going places, although there still only is the 5 of you, oh well.

Anyway, our next poster will Mr Hirst on his favourite subject, the silly green bar.

**metho** · 08-17-2010, 05:37 PM

I want to beat my competition in google serps for 'widget sales'. The highest number of backlinks any one competitor site has is 523. If I get more than 523 backlinks, I'll beat them. I got a bunch of spamming to do at the forums - better go buy some more coffee and cigarettes...

**ThailandForum** · 08-17-2010, 05:52 PM

^Your nearly there

you have 418 posts already, wont be long till you have 524 posts and take that number 1 spot on google

**vangogh** · 08-17-2010, 09:36 PM

I'm going to disagree with you a little about Alexa. I agree it's meaningless in the sense of the absolute numbers. It's also highly skewed toward webmaster, seo, and other tech sites, since it only counts people who have installed the Alexa toolbar or similar.

However if you understand it's limitations and flaws you can derive some useful information from it.

For example track a site over time. Again the absolute numbers are meaningless, but the growth or lack of growth is reasonably accurate. At least they have been for sites under my control when compared to data from other analytics packages. I do have some confidence in the traffic changes Alexa shows, though again not the absolute numbers.

So if you want to check on the health of a site you could look at Alexa and see if the graph is going up or down. I wouldn't use Alexa alone, but it could be used as part of a site analysis.

They also now offer demographic data which isn't always available everywhere.

Alexa is meaningless in the sense that it has anything to do with where your rank or that you should ever buy or advertise on a site just because it has good numbers. But if you understand how it works and what its limitations are you can get some useful information from it.

**ThailandForum** · 08-18-2010, 03:30 AM

^And as soon as a link to someones site is put on a webmaster forum a massive spike in traffic is seen by alexa, sounds really useful to me considering for most sites in the world just 2 alexa users can cause that massive spike, ie if 1 in 5,000 has alexa toolbar alexa see's that as 10,000 visitors.

**vangogh** · 08-18-2010, 06:21 PM

If the site you're talking about has very little traffic then yes one or two users can spike the traffic like you say. As you start moving toward sites that do have healthy traffic that doesn't happen.

I'm not suggesting anyone should trust the numbers, but don't discount Alexa completely. For a good number of sites you can actually learn something.

People like to say so and so is useless and has no value. That's generally not true. If you learn how a thing works and what it's limitations are you can usually gain some useful information from it. That information isn't necessarily the end all and be all, but it can still be useful information.

**ThailandForum** · 08-19-2010, 03:19 AM

Alexa has this site in the top 3,000 busiest sites in the world, yet over the last 6 hours it has had less than 6,000 visitors, do you really believe those figures bare any relation to actual facts, yes the 6,000 does, so looking at those figures it must be that most of the world has decided to stop using the internet if all you need is that many visitors to get into the top 3,000.

**chrishirst** · 08-20-2010, 07:56 PM

But don't forget that the largest user demographic of the Alexa toolbar is from India and Pakistan, and with all the ~~sig link drop~~ erm sorry SEO experts we get from that region ......

**blue-dreamer** · 08-21-2010, 01:44 PM

Do you know, in 12 odd years I've been using t'intentet, I think I've only ever seen one person with the Alexa toolbar. and that was many years ago.

**vangogh** · 08-24-2010, 05:06 PM

Quote:

Alexa has this site in the top 3,000 busiest sites in the world, yet over the last 6 hours it has had less than 6,000 visitors, do you really believe those figures bare any relation to actual facts

You should read what I wrote above. I said the absolute numbers were not to be trusted. No one is suggesting this is the 3,000th most popular site online. That's one of the limitations of Alexa data. It's skewed toward the sites visited by the small amount of people who've installed an Alexa Toolbar.

However that doesn't mean you can't draw useful information from Alexa. Look at the graph for this site over time. Alexa is showing that the site is growing in terms of traffic for a little over a year now. I'm not privy to the actual traffic stats, but I suspect they would also show a similar growth pattern.

I can tell you on all sites where I have access to actual traffic stats, especially those sites that get a fair amount of traffic, the Alexa graph aligns pretty well with what the analytics package shows for that site.

Yes, the absolute numbers are skewed. They aren't accurate (so is every other package that claims to measure web traffic). I never said they were. What I'm saying is if you understand how Alexa works you can gain some useful information from it if you ignore the information that is clearly flawed.

Ignore the absolute number of visitors. We all agree that number isn't realistic. That doesn't mean other things Alexa shows are also unrealistic. Some of what they show is useful.

**ThailandForum** · 08-24-2010, 05:15 PM

Why not use google?
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=...ate=all&sort=0

**francis84** · 08-24-2010, 09:33 PM

Alexa rankings are calculated based on the traffic your site receives from people who have an Alexa Toolbar installed on their browser. That's it. No other factor. That is why; for me; Alexa Rank SUCKS.

**vangogh** · 08-27-2010, 08:06 PM

Quote:

Why not use google?

You could use Google, but using Google or not has nothing to do with Alexa. It's like saying Fords are lousy cars because you can always drive a BMW.

All I was trying to point out is that Alexa isn't 100% useless like everyone seems to think. You're exactly right about the data being skewed and that we shouldn't trust the numbers. Just saying that you can still get some relative information about it.

**ThailandForum** · 08-27-2010, 09:03 PM

Last time I used alexa was to check some forums, top 50k of busiest sites in the world, I was shocked, how could that be I thought, I then checked average page views per person, 75 page views per person with a 50 percent bounce rate, ie people were browsing 150 pages each, they didn't even have any good porn pictures on the site