On a rare occassion, I'll check out my alexa rankings. However, I hold absolutely 0% faith in their accuracy and I don't think they count for very much either. That's just my opinion.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...w.daniweb.com/

the Alexa toolbar is only good to use a a very general gage to see how your site is doing. I would put as much weight on the Alexa rankings as I do in gogle's PR (BTW, I put little weight on PR, probably a lot less than most link traders). Neither ranking has anything directly to do with how good your site is, how much it is helping or driving your business, or how much search engine traffic you get. Instead. rely on your server logs and sales to determine how effective your site is.

I disagree, Arizona Web. I actually feel that PR has somewhat of a direct correlation with google search engine traffic. For example, these forums have lots 'n' lots of nested pages. However, many of the individual threads aren't listed in the search engines. I think that if I could get my forum index and thread listing pages to have a higher PR, google will spider and index more of my threads. But, yes, Alexa is just meant to be a general ranking. When I look at any Alexa ranking, I always seem to automatically attach the phrase "for entertainment purposes only" to it I actually always laugh when I see advertisements such as "website for sale! alexa ranking of 75,000!! offer won't last long!"

Google's PR has nothing to do with Yahoo, Intomi, AOL, or the new MSN coming out. Although Google is the biggest of them, it is not as big as all others combined. Since G is the only one that uses PR, and newer aglos are diminishing the value of PR, I'll stick to my guns that PR isn't as important as some think. Incoming links and their text are far more important than PR, and on page elements are far more important than PR when determining search engine rankings in all search engines. Google's PR still does hold some weight and is still part of their algorhythm, but it is no longer even remotely as important as it used to be. Having constantly changing content will bring in your google bot more often, your site structure will help google bot determine how deep it will crawl. PR is a part of this equation, but it is not the important part. If it was, my site would easily be number one for my main keyword, since I have a PR7 with lots of PR6 and PR5 pages. Other sites are dominating the SERPs in all engines because of their off page optimization and google's perception of what is relevant.

Also, you might notice that this year Google’s results look a lot closer to yahoo’s lately. Prior to last November (the big google dance known as florida) google’s PR was a huge determining factor in ranking. It still is an element, but if you research PR in reputable SEO forums like HighRankings, SEO-Chat, Cre8asite, and SEO-Guy you will likely hear the admins echoing a similar feeling towards PR. Everybody still wants a high PR, but I personally would rather a high ranking. The last two updates have shown some sites to drop PR but gain rankings and vice versa. If PR was as important as some think, then this wouldn’t be possible.

Regardless, PR is cool. I have a lot, which I prefer, but don’t really care enough either way. Some really want that PR, but I just want more traffic. IMO PR chasers are chasing the wrong goal.

In my opinion Alexa rankings are pretty much useless for anything other than window dressing.

1. My understanding is that the rankings are based only on visitors to a site that have the Alexa Toolbar installed. How many web surfers actually have the toolbar installed? Haven't been able to find that info from Alexa's site. The toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer so any visitors not using IE are not even counted. Check your web stats to see how many visitors you get that aren't using IE.

2. You can easily skew your ranking by installing the toolbar and visiting your site often. Don't believe me? Check out my site http://www.canistotasoftware.com . At the time this post is being written my Alexa rank is 168,863. Pretty good isn't it, but considering I am averaging 200 unique visitors or so a day that means that there are only 169,000 sites that get more hits per day than 200? I doubt it.

Can any so called important tool be so less important? At least the google PR number isn't based on such arbitrary information.

I agree on both accounts Canistota.

I've been using the Alexa bar for the past couple of months as just another tool to help in building 'the picture.' Alexa themselves say that the results aren't reliable until you get below 100,000, and the lower the number, the more reliable it is.

This makes sense from a statistical viewpoint, in that the bigger your survey sample, the more accurate the results are.

How many Alexa toolbars are in use? I don't know either. Last I heard last year, 10 million had been downloaded. Which doesn't tell us anything about how many were installed or are in active use today. Wild guess at 500,000 to a million???

I recently used the Alexa bar while comparing a few sites for a small ad campaign. I think it was probably reasonable to discount sites rated over 1 million, and be most interested in sites under 500,000. These were not SEO-savvy sites, so it's unlikely they'd even know about Alexa or its abuse tactics, never mind implement them.

Any point in us comparing our Alexa rankings with say our July site stats for pageviews? Here are 3 small sites I have:

Site A: Alexa 802,000 July Pageviews 13,400
Site B: Alexa 382,000 July pageviews 51,000
Site C: Alexa 170,000 July pageviews 70,000

We might get a picture on what's a reasonable margin of error for Alexa figs.

I have both the Alexa and Google tool bars, they're helpful more often than not. Especially for avid web promoters like me.

I use the google toolbar. Unfortunately, without a PR update as of late, the PR bar isn't of much help anymore. But I still use it as a searchbox and a popup blocker. As for Alexa, you guys already know my take on that