Alexa rankings

What does alexa ranking mean? I never understood how it actually works. At least google scrape websites, and serve them in the search results, they can count which website gets the most clicks, and also find who is linking to who. The same goes for bing and other search engines. But for alexa it is different, and very limited.

Where the data comes from:

According to wikipedia:

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com which provides commercial web traffic data. Once it is installed, the Alexa Toolbar collects data on browsing behavior and transmits it to the Alexa website, where it is stored and analyzed, forming the basis for the company's web traffic reporting.

The data comes from people browsing using the tool bar. Who uses a tool bars anymore? I did some research and I found this interesting forum on seochat. The question was titled "Why use Alexa Toolbar".

Question:

Someone use Alexa Toolbar for SEO. But I do not get any benefit by this Toolbar. Can anybody clear it?

Answers:

• There is no benefit.
  Best to focus on methods that actually have some effect.

• Yeah well ok: the only benefit is "taking advantage of the gullible". There is no direct SEO advantage, however. Alexa Rankings - which are still easy enough to manipulate - are not used by any of the major search engines (which do NOT include Alexa)

• The Alexa ranking of a website is a guide to how popular that website is in the world. The most popular website in the world has an Alexa ranking of 1, the second most popular website in the world has an Alexa ranking of 2, and so on. It indicates your performance on the internet based on the ranking of your website. It's very good for SEO.

Except for the third comment, most people had the same idea, the Alexa rank is not reliable at all. First of all it is only used by a few, mostly SEO "Gurus", or developers, or those that somehow have it pre-installed on their browser. There is no real advantage of having the toolbar for the regular user.

Alexa is still popular today.

So why is alexa still popular today? Maybe it has something to do with being owned by Amazon. Also if you think about it, the idea of knowing how much traffic a website gets could be a very interesting metric, if it is accurate. Website owners don't go around sharing this information and even if they do it is a very rough estimates. Alexa is advertising to have those numbers. Are those numbers real? We will never know.

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