I am not a fan of Alexa. I like for information to be accurate and reliable. Alexa falls very short when it comes to these very important points. The simple fact is a lot of people pay way more attention to Alexa than they should and are under the false impression that the Alexa information is close to being accurate.
I should also mention that some anti-spyware programs considers Alexa to be spyware.
The television industry has confidence in the Nielsen television ratings. There is a much more scientific approach taken with them.
The Alexa Toolbar is much more popular in some countries than it is in others. That can lead to painting a false picture. As an example, there are a very large number of Korean sites that rank very high on Alexa.
The Alexa Toolbar isn't available to users of all browsers. That leaves out a growing percentage of users.
The Alexa Toolbar is a lot more popular among certain groups of people than others. For example, it is much more popular among webmasters than it is among the general population. As a result sites that are visited by webmaters are going to look to be much more popular than they really are.
I really do like 5 Star and 5 Star has a very good Alexa ranking. But I must be honest and say that 5 Star isn't nearly as popular as the Alexa ranking indicates. 5 Star has a better Alexa ranking than many large metropolitan newspaper and television sites that have SEVERAL TIMES as much traffic as 5 Star.
Add to this the fact that there are programs and services which, for a fee, will take steps to increase the Alexa ranking of their customers. There are people who use these programs and services.
If that isn't bad enough, a person can improve his or her own Alexa ranking by simply installing the Alexa Toolbar and visiting their own site. No one in the world could be visiting the site but the owner and it really isn't that hard for the owner to easily get the site to rank within the top 100,000. That is a total joke for something such as that to be possible.
But there are some people who do value the Alexa rankings and believe they are accurate. This isn't lost on some people who want to sell sites. They do things to give themselves a higher Alexa ranking and then talk about it the Alexa ranking as a positive when trying to sell their site.
If the Nielsen television ratings were as far of, as easily manipulated and as unrepresentative of the audience as the Alexa rankings are, the television industry would have stopped relying on them decades ago.
I was tempted to say that the Alexa rankings should be taken with a grain of salt, but even that would be giving more credit than is deserved.
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