How Accurate is the Alexa Toolbar

I was having a look at how accurate the Alexa Toolbar is when viewing their public website information.

For example you can use the Toolbar or visit Alexa.com to view basic traffic stats on any site in the world. Fact is many webmasters, SEO professionals and web developers use this tool everyday to check website traffic data.

I have come to the conclusion that the more popular your site is, ie the better your Alexa rank is – then the more accurate the stats will be in relation to that particular site.

When comparing my Google Analytics data to the public stats on Alexa I was surprised to see a considerable difference.

For example, according to Alexa I am getting about 25% of my visits from search engines, whereas with Google Analytics I am actually getting over 50% of my traffic from search engines.

Obviously in this case we can assume the Google stats will be more accurate (as they are a proper tracking tool you install on your website), whereas Alexa is only pulling info from their toolbar data.

Another key indicator of how popular your site is can be measured by your incoming links. Alexa do this but unfortunately they don’t seem to always been updating the number of your incoming Links. Do note though that the links they measure is from individual websites linking to you, not total links. Google Analytics has much more accurate reporting for measuring your incoming links.

Lately I have had a project going on here to try and improve my Alexa Rank as much as possible, increase my SEO, and also gain as much traffic from Social Media sites as possible.

Whilst I have always been working on these points, I have lately decided to push even harder into these 3 areas. I believe once your site reaches an Alexa Rank of under 100,000 then you notice more reoccurring traffic, more people linking to your site, more people recommending your site and sharing your content on social media sites. Basically your reputation is increasing as a website.

Always think ahead – if you notice traffic increasing from your tracking tools (Alexa, Google) – make sure you are on the right foundations for handling this traffic. Soon I will be moving to a private server so that I can push ever harder in the social media space, particularly with sites like Digg and StumbleUpon which have the potential to send you tens of thousands of visitors in a day if your content goes viral. I will soon have some more posts on configuring your Virtual Private Server (VPS), and I’m also thinking about making an Australia networking group for Digg/ StumbleUpon users.

Check out my previous article on How to Increase your Alexa Rank.