It's a completely terrible indication of true traffic. I have a new site that took 6 months to develop, and it was in the top 100,000 before I allowed the site to be crawled in December. The only people who even knew about the site were me and a couple of friends... Three months later, it's 37,861.

*That said*, however, the Alexa toolbar does have it's uses. If you sell advertising you may have been surprised how many people inquire about your Alexa rating. It's so useful to have a low Alexa rating in the minds of those who do not know these things that I even put a "Get the Free Alexa Toolbar" link on the site.

I totally agree. Alexa is such a waste IMO. On the other hand, I think Google is doing a good job getting their PR scale down at Alexa's level

I know. Once the site went into the Top 100,000 just from me alone riding the Alexa toolbar like a witch on broom I laughed every time I thought about it.

Regarding PR, of course the first question an advertiser asks is what is your PR? Why? Because group think rules much on the Internet, and other webmasters are obsessed with their PR. It's just a little green bar, but the bigger it gets the more money they are willing to pay to appear on your site. With under 10,000 backlinks you're barely in the game.

The Google theory is that the more incoming links you have the better your site must be, as though some natural progression of thousands of other webmasters seeing your site is occuring, with them linking to you purely out of a service to their own visitors. The truth is that people cook them up themselves with sitewide footer link deals with webmasters higher up on the food chain and buy advertising themselves --- thus making a mockery of the theory. Just something you just have to do, though, or you don't get a place at the table except for something like "wireless guages". (I'm #1!)

So much is just playing the game.

Well what I was actually getting at is that Google has an internal pagerank algorithm based on backlinks. But the PR value that we see in the google toolbar is rarely updated and rarely accurate ... similar to Alexa ranking

oh snap!!

Gah ...

I have only heard negative things about Alexa rankings and how unreliable they are. Thus I opt to have less toolbar clutter and forget that it even exists!

Can you please give the detailed info how to improve the listing using Alexa Toolbar.

See temi's post on page one of this thread. It's all you have to do, all you can do.

Rankings are fun and all but Alexa Surf has a powerful program that will get your stats really low. It's simular to an autosurf program exept they only allow Alexa users to surf, so you get high alexa rankings.