• Our users are disproportionately likely to visit sites that are featured on alexa.com such as amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be overcounted.

• The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of the various browsers is unknown. Alexa's sample includes users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla browsers. The AOL/Netscape and Opera browser is not supported, which means that sites operated by these companies may be undercounted.

• The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of various operating systems is unknown. Alexa sample includes toolbars built for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

• The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Chinese sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in China, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Chinese Alexa users.

• In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.

• The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https:). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.

 

This means that they know that their information is not completely correct, they are telling you that their information is not completely correct and they have provided understandable reasons why their information is not correct. So what does this mean to you?

Well first, you need to understand that inaccurate doesn’t mean that the ratings are not valuable. While they may not provide you with the most accurate data in the world, they do provide some people with a sample measurement of traffic with an adjustment for errors. Some sites use this information to calculate your site’s worth. For instance, Text Link Ads factors in your Alexa rating. The better your ranking, the more your site can earn. Text Link Ads is not alone.

The bottom line is that people are looking for every measurement they can get to determine how many people look at your site and how much traffic you get. PageRank, Alexa rankings as well as other factors are used to make the best possible judgment about your site. Remember that people don’t know you. They don’t know your quality as an individual or your quality as a website owner. All they know is how your site looks and how they feel about your site. These ranking tools try to give people a somewhat subjective picture of your site to allow them to determine if they may want to conduct business with you. The rankings provide some way to gauge what’s happening on the backend of your site. Just because they are not 100% accurate in their measurements doesn’t mean that they are not valuable. Therefore, if it matters to you, you need to work to make the most of the tools that supply that information instead of discounting the tools as useless. In future articles, we are going to examine the Alexa system in more depth and create a system to make the most of Alexa.

Looking for ways to boost your Alexa rankings? Check out our 5 simple ways that will help you do just that.

Posted By Kila Morton

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