I often hear people talk about their Alexa rank as an important metric of their site’s success. As I understand it, Alexa rankings are based on the stats from a very small user base of people with the Alexa toolbar installed. So why is Alexa rank relevant?
Alexa Rank is a measure of your site popularity relative to other sites. It is based on Alexa panel which is a general name for data collected from many Alexa devices: Toolbars, plug-in and registered users.
In short, Alexa Rank is a relative measure comparing to other sites in the panel.
Because the data comes only from users with Alexa panel it has some limitation and can be unreliable. Because it’s relative, others rank may affect your site.
Pros
- Alexa measure is comparative tool for your industry.
- Used by advertisers to get website marketing potential.
- Website with higher Alexa rank attracts more advertising and get more ads.
- “Same for all”, pages and website traffic are measured in the same way.
Cons
- Can be easily and greatly manipulated (you can buy it).
- Not everyone are using the Alexa toolbar- how reliable it can be ?
- No separation between top level domain and sub domains.
- Not reflects the true power and status of the website.
Source: Quora
