I have long been confused about why Alexa rankings are taken such notice of when it comes to monetizing sites, I personally believe that the Alexa ranking doesn't mean much at all, however now that the Alexa toolbar has come out for FireFox, I have finally installed it. Its pretty unobtrusive and now shows me the Alexa rating of every site that I visit, plus I guess it will boost my own ratings, because this is how it works....

How exactly does Alexa work?

Here is the description from their site...

Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews.

In a nutshell an example is this site, currently it is ranked around 170,000 on the Alexa site, however this really means out of all the Alexa users it is ranked at 170,000. ( its not accurate when it comes to the popularity of a site on the world stage I don't believe, however it is some kind of indication I guess.

The problem is that if you have a site that is visited by for example webmasters, most of whom have the alexa toolbar installed, you will rank way higher than for example a recipe site that may have more visitors but hardly any that have the toolbar installed.

How can you increase your Alexa ranking?

Here is great post done a while ago by Maki at Dosh Dosh -20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank

The one I like this one best for its sheer cunning ...

Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.....

What are the top sites on Alexa at the moment?

On the front page of the Alexa sites you can view that status of the top contenders.

Why do you think sites like review me, text link ads and other programs take so much notice of Alexa rankings? Is it because they are targeted at webmasters and so is Alexa?

Or is there simply no better way to determine the performance of a site?

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