Alexa on Acid

[Homesurfer]

Back a long time ago, I used to check Alexa daily to see what they said about my site and where it ranked and so on. Then I checked about once a week. Now I rarely look, but I do occasionally take a look.

And it is like it has gone nuts (or else my site has). What used to be a fairly steady graph line trending upward or downward depending on whatever factors...now seems like an erratic heartbeat. Still, it seems that the erratic up and down swing velocity is similar with other sites.

Erratic Swing Velocity. Cool name for a stat. "And what was your "erratic swing velocity" this week?

Who else takes a look at it from time to time, and has anyone noticed their "Erratic Swing Velocity" (according to Alexa) has been more erratic than in the past?

[kyle422]

I'm not ranked in the top 100,000 so the graph doesn't show any results for me. There is a neat toolbar for Firefox that not only displays Google PR, it also includes an Alexa rank toolbar. http://quirk.co.za/searchstatus/
Another cool function is that it will also put a red box next to the toolbar rank if it is listed in the Google directory.

[Homesurfer]

Cool. I quit using Firefox when I reformatted my computer. The reformatting had caused the problems that caused me to switch to Firefox to...disappear. I didn't start re-using it because I like having the Google Toolbar and at the time, the Google Toolbar didn't work with Firefox.

But I've always liked the Firefox Browser, so maybe I'll download it again now.

[Oppenheimer Group]

When I check Alexa I find little, or no correlation to actual traffic and as you mention it jumps up and down without explanation. Our traffic is reasonanly consistant and every week or so Alexa has our site drop of the face of the earth.

Oh well we know their tracking scheme was flawed in any case.

[kensmith]

Oh well we know their tracking scheme was flawed in any case.

The way they track your traffic makes the information 100% useless. Way to small of a sample of web traffic and way to easy to manipulate.

[Homesurfer]

Maybe even fewer people are using the Alexa toolbar than before, making it even less useful than it ever was. It didn't really provide any useful information the way the Google toolbar does.

Lots of people use the Google toolbar. That could be interesting.