After reading about Youtube.com’s recent overtaking of Google.com, their parent company, in Alexa’s Page view stats, I thought I’d discuss a bit about how overrated Alexa really is.
Youtube (Maroon) - Google (Blue)
Alexa is a good measure for ones own website, when comparing current traffic to the traffic of the past, but when comparing to other sites, especially outside your niche, it’s practically worthless. Here are a few reasons why:
- Alexa only tracks visits and page views from visitors who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. The toolbar was only recently made available for Firefox.
- Certain niches will have more people who have the toolbar installed. Niches such as SEO and webmaster related sites will show up in Alexa as much higher then niches which include people sharing files. People involved in SEO and webmaster discussion most likely have the toolbar installed, while people involved in file sharing, and those afraid of spyware will not install Alexa. Case in point. I run 2 websites. BestMoneyPlace.com ranked 7900th in Alexa actually receives a little less traffic then my File sharing Forum which is ranked 26,800th in Alexa.
- People cheat all the time. It’s fairly easy to cheat the system, which obviously is not fair. I will not discuss this any further because I am totally against such cheating.
We recommend that those who do look at Alexa do so in a general sense, not basing your ad purchases on Alexa ranks alone. Alexa is a good tool, but it has many downfalls. Improvements are said to be on their way, by the Amazon owned company, however Alexa will never be a full proof tool.
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