Lawrence:
Thanks for sharing.
Randy Kemp

Lawrence .. I will agree with you on one thing. I don't believe that Alexa is worth a damn in determining the real value of traffic to one's site. In fact I suspect there are few folk who really know how they come up with their results.

But I do beg to differ on another. Less than 6 months ago I was sitting around the 166,000 and I was in none of the internet networks you speak of where other affiliates were pushing me forward. In fact, I have tried to steer well clear of these .. preferring to largely do my own thing. Certainly, I was doing a lot more link building, article submissions etc and probably creating quite a lot more content than I am currently, but the traffic numbers were nothing stupendous. So how did I get there? I'm not really sure .. but not by the means you suggest. I do know that when I got down to around the 200,000 mark - after having been up close to the million only 6 weeks earlier .. then things started to slow down markedly. But I had been pre-warned this would happen. My Alexa ranking is presently at 368,866 and I guess that is some reflection of my reduced activity .. but .. I don't really know.

But yes - a site needs to be judged by its results .. not its Alexa ranking and not its PR .. although its great if you can successfully link to a site with a higher PR than your own.

Hi Lawrence,

Indeed you are very correct. Alexa is very loose with it' s rankings that is for sure... What I have noticed with Alexa is that your ranking will continue to get better when you are adding content... When you stop adding content, Alexa will slowly decrease you ranking....

This is when the Google page rank becomes more important when choosing potential JV partners and Mentors.....

The Alexa rank has been used over and over by the wannabe Guru's to promote their credibilty I totally agree with that.... The real Guru's are smart enough not to even mention it now, becasue they know the savy internet people will definitly have something to say....

I have also noticed that people who have the Alexa Toolbar on their PC will continue to get better rankings from Alexa too..... So Alexa reward those who use their tools rather than genuine and quality websites with quality products and information....

Nice post Lawrence : )

Have a great day

Clayton J

Thank you Lawrence for shedding insightful information once again and again!

xxx

Did you realise that you can go from 1 million to 280,000 if you sign up to some affiliate marketing schemes, , example Martin Allsop http://www.martinallsop.com/16EAA9AA4394DFCB95AA0E8E08/ezine3.htm

Martin is of course into NLP...... It has nothing to do with content or sex (now that's a laugh isn't it!

Look at Dean Hunt's site http://deanhunt.com/ see also http://tommwilson.com/web/dean-hunt-google-page-rank-scheme.php

Now I maintain that it all appears so transparent, but there's more to it than that - linking with the best can bring you so high!

What do you think? True or fiction?

I do think Alexa can be useful in filtering out low traffic sites. From my own experience comparing Analytics numbers and Alexa numbers for several of my own and other people's sites who I have access to I am pretty confident in assuming that any site that doesn't have anything less than 100k Alexa rank probably gets just a little if any traffic (1k visits a day or less). All the sites I have ever worked with that got even a few hundred visitors a day consistently were all under 100k Alexa eventually. So basically, any site that only has a 500k (no offense to anyone) or worse Alexa rank is probably a new site or doesn't get very much traffic. Sure some of the low Alexa rank sites may have participated in some schemes but as the Alexa numbers get lower it gets harder to manipulate, so I tend to trust that the lower the Alexa number is for a given site the more likely that site really is getting a decent amount of traffic. You've got to be getting several thousands of visitors a day to get in the 10k Alexa range, and that would be very hard to spoof.

Nice addition Chris,

Thanks for sharing that info on your own personal experiences.....

I am a bit more lenient than you I actually will look at anyone in the top 500,000 ranks as someone I would research and learn a lot more about when deciding on joint ventures etc.....

But your statistsics shared are very accurate from my own experiences too....

Yes it would be hard to manufacturer thousands of hits a day under the 10k mark for sure....

Cheers

Clayton J

I don't agree with your view Chris.

I am looking for leads/inquiries rather than traffic, which ironically we get plenty of.

A high Alexa number does not necessarily mean wealth - I suggest content is more important, however I am branding a name rather than affiliate marketing.

Anyone can spend loads of time on Alexa, but the majority of companies that we do business with do not rely on Alexa at all.

Alexa is so much spin......

Kind regards,

Lawrence

I didn't say anything about wealth, just traffic. I know different industries have different levels of profitability and different sites have different per visitor values (which can vary based on content on which point I agree). I was only saying that Alexa numbers are highly correlated with the amount of traffic a site is getting especially for low Alexa numbers which are hard to spoof. Sites with low numbers likely are getting a significant amount of real traffic. I said nothing about the value of that traffic. Traffic is only one piece of the puzzle for an online business, but Alexa does shed some light on that one piece, so I do think Alexa can be useful.

Yes of course it can.

We host the site at godaddy, and get their daily stats.