Here's the deal. It's time for Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) to upgrade their algorithms or they lose all respect as any kind of metric for website popularity.

Alexa relies heavily on use of voluntary plugin to gather the statistics and because of this Alexa is a flawed system.

Why? Because Alexa counts all views, even if the blogger or webmaster is checking the pages out.

Proof?

• I have Alexa installed on all my computers and browsers.
• As a result my blog at http://zemalf.com has Alexa ranking of 87,235.

The more real statistics like http://compete.com will show you that at the moment my blog enjoys healthy 1000-1500 visitors every month. And other blogs getting monthly visitors in the 5-10k range have Alexa rankings higher than 100000.

I'm not complaining, my site looks awesome on Alexa.

I'm in the Top 100k websites in the world!

Alexa gets more "accurate" in the Top 100 and Top 1000 range, but even there, it's not really good.

It's just a number. It gives (false) bragging rights.

Stop staring at it.

Your daily/monthly subscribers mean a lot more and it's important that you know those numbers. If you like, you can make the numbers public at http://www.seethestats.com/ if you like, or let them use compete.com which does a reasonably good job at it.

For some reason Alexa has gained a status in the web, and just in case that won't be changing:

• Make sure you have Alexa installed on all browsers and computers you use
  • Alexa Toolbar: http://www.alexa.com/toolbar
  • Alexa Sparky, Firefox Addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5362
• Encourage your readers and fans to install it too
• Install Alexa on your kids and all other computers in your household
• Ask all your friends and co-workers to install Alexa on their computers and tell them to tell their friends to do the same
• Ask all your friends, family, readers and fans to click through your website without even reading
• Recruit your dog, cat and even the hamster to "Alexify" your site

On a more serious note, in addition to working on increasing real traffic and subscribers, work on to increase your page views via internal linking, showing related posts, etc. Not so much for Alexa, but because it's good practise for your readers and it'll make your blog better.

There you go. Part rant, part "how to cheat Alexa" guide :)

What do you think? Is Alexa as overrated and flawed as I wrote here?

p.s. since some people who have not read this post still think Alexa does matter, check out my blog at http://zemalf.com & write a review for me at http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/zemalf.com :)

October 2010 UPDATE: Alexa still sucks

My blogs Alexa ranking is around 60k-70k. my wife's blog gets more traffic than mine, or about the same, again depending on the day. her blogs ranking? 7 MILLION. accurate data and "other methods to track traffic" my ass. My blogs audience is tech-savvy bloggers who have the Alexa addons/plugins and shit. Her audience does not = Alexa doesn't rank them. Forget Alexa, look at your traffic stats and shoot for some traffic goals. - but don't forget to install Alexa plugin to play the stupid dumb-ass system like hell :)