And interestingly … here is what the posts that you provided say :
Post #2 says :
So does this mean that Alexa rank is completely useless? Not really. In fact it can be extremely useful, but (*** another big but) in my experience, only if the 3 month average rank is 100,000 or higher. Anything below that is just too easy to fake with just one person.
I can’t compare the Alexa rank of seologs.com to that of any non-seo.com site, but I can compare it to very similar sites, like SEOmoz.org, webmasterworld.com, and any other SEO related sites, and get a pretty good idea of how this site’s traffic compares.
While Post #3 actually says :
* So when is Alexa useful? *
Alexa can be useful for monitoring site traffic trends for one particular site – and for generating a list of similar sites by seeing which other sites Alexa users read once they’ve read the site you are checking up on. The average page views data is also much less likely to be skewed by the Alexa readership bias, so can be used to compare different sites.
Above all, though, I would say Alexa is useful for checking on any site you are thinking of partnering with / advertising on. If a site does not appear in the top 100,000 sites then for us that sets alarm bells ringing and we would not proceed any further with that site without seeing independently produced / audited site stats.
Post #1 says
Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact – I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn’t, Deadspin, Alexa’s accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore.
Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month
Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month
According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin’s 10,000 ranking.
Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15 even within the top 10,000 sites where the accuracy is higher.
In short, Alexa is almost useless for websites outside of the top 1000, and no sensible investment or reporting should be influenced by it.
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Basically he’s arguing as I did that webmasters will skew it …. and then disses Alexa as you suggest … but then he would say that … after all he’s ranking at 380,000+ and slipping every day.
:bigsmile: