Does Alexa deserve any credibility?

It doesn't; not even to me.

For most people, most of the time, it's complete nonsense, in my opinion.

All it really measures is the number of visitors a site gets who have the Alexa Toolbar installed and running in their browser at the time of their visit. And internet marketers are just about the only people who use that.

And even that, it can measure only terribly unreliably and randomly. Which is why it's a complete waste of time. They can't measure any other traffic. The only way to monitor traffic reliably is through a site's server logs.

No - not at all.

The last time I looked at my "Alexa rankings", I checked out two of my sites. One, which is a private blog only really for my rather widespread family and gets almost no traffic at all, had a really low "Alexa ranking", meaning that they think it "gets enormous traffic" (but not according to my server logs!), and the other, which genuinely gets so much traffic, in floods, that I have to have special hosting for it, is apparently nowhere to be seen!

It really is as unreliable as that.

But when you look at what it's actually measuring, that's not a great surprise.

These things are of possible, slight, debatable relevance if you're (i) selling a website to someone who for some reason "believes in it", or (ii) selling advertising space on a website to someone who for some reason believes in it. For anyone else, and any other purposes, I think it's more or less a total waste of time, signifying nothing.

Clarified in these threads, among others ...

Does Alexa give total traffic qty?

(newb) Is Alexa important?

How important is Alexa ranking?

Importance of Alexa.

How do you find the guru sites that are highest ranking in Alexa?

ha ha, I wondered if you'd bite Alexa Sorry couldn't resist, please excuse my juvenile behavior

Unless you are in like the top one thousand, it is totally meaningless. Even then, it can still be easily manipulated.

means chuff all to me too...

its all about ££££'s

If its getting 10 visits and making money or getting 1,00000000's visits and making nothing I rather have the 10 payers all day long :-)

Manipulate? OK, years ago when had a SBI account it was recommended that we all get the Alexa toolbar. We were given SBI management created sites to visit and to check their rating on Alexa. The recommended sites ALWAYS ranked high in Alexa. This proved what an excellent program SBI had.

So, you get a large group of subscribers, recommend they get the toolbar and to prove how good your sites are, you have your group visit your site to check it out and also go to Alexa and see how highly ranked the sites are.

Back then I participated in the SBI forum a lot. My site was in my signature or profile. My NOTHING website gained a pretty decent Alexa rating from all the SBI members checking out what I was doing. LOLOLOL!! Manipluated statistics? You judge for yourself.

I don't even know my Alexa ranking and it doesn't really matter to me. Alexa rank is just a title to me, as long as you are getting visitors ans customers then you really shouldn't worry about it.

As the others said, your Alexa rank is pretty much useless. If you want to improve it then install the toolbar and frequently visit your own site, and encourage your friends/family/visitors to do the same.

I've had sites with 100x more traffic rank worse off on Alexa than some of my clients' sites that had less traffic. It all depends on your niche really... websites with tech-savvy visitors will almost always rank better on Alexa because chances are their audience will have the toolbar installed.

Yes! Alexa ranking is important for us because internet marketing is done in various distinct site,this ranking has a definite advantages to having a high alexa rank. If we can do any marketing by using our sites, then you can demonstrate more proof relevant to traffic, and in alexa ranking the case is different and it does different evaluation of your traffic which adds credibility for that advertiser will come knocking at your organization willing to give ad budget.

NO, Alexa is already credibility that we got for our internet marketing work. If we got visitor alexa improve else decrease. Alexa shows only results of website alexa ranking, quality of website in order to getting visitor.

I think that it is useless too.

A lot of people think that it has meaning and that you should always check your rankings there but it is not worth it.

It sounds good to mention to people who have no clue, but in reality it has no real value to serious marketers.

It is good for researching.