Alexa Rankings – How reliable are they?

Webpreneurs, those who make a living on the web, seem to live and die by Alexa rankings. A very popular site will have a low ranking, say, less than 250,000. An extremely popular site maybe down under 50,000 (those people can make a nice living with a site like that).

Those of us with new sites tend more toward 1 million and up. A few months ago, my FreeComputerConsultant.com was sub 800,000 and I was pretty happy with that. Since then, traffic to my site has increased, but my Alexa ranking has tanked. So I got to wondering: “how does Alexa know?”. Without having a hook in every major internet router or a bug in every single site, how can they tell how many visitors, how many pages, etc? They don’t even agree with Google on sites linking in, and that info is available with a web crawler.

The answer, from Alexa’s own site, seems to be that the Alexa toolbar loaded in volunteer users browsers will phone home with the data. So, that isn’t even as scientific as a Nielsen rating for TV shows. But get this – the toolbar is for Internet Explorer only, doesn’t work for Firefox! Yet, sites like mine SCREAM at visitors to use Firefox instead of IE. And since 40% of my users are using Firefox or another browser, NOT IE, certainly none of those visits are counted. Nor can Alexa tell what percentage of visitors to my site are using IE in order to mathematically make and adjustment.

So I thought, hey, let’s give it a try. I attempted to load the Alexa toolbar in Internet Explorer on my PC. Won’t install. Finally I get a message from Trend Micro that Alexa is spyware and it’s blocking it for me. How hard am I supposed to try in order to get this toolbar loaded?

Without going on and on in a rant here, does anyone else see the problem? Does anyone else wonder why Alexa carries the weight it does?

If I’m missing something here, perhaps completely off base, PLEASE fill me in by commenting to this post.

Otherwise, if you do have IE, would you mind loading the Alexa toolbar and heading over to my FreeComputerConsultant.com website and browse around for a while? Thanks in advance.

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