Alexa Rankings And PageRank Are Both A Waste Of Time
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I just read a post that asked the question "Is Alexa Ranking Really that Important?". It presented the conclusion that Alexa isn't accurate but that it is important. I disagree.
Alexa has for years been the laughing stock of website statistics. It's only based on the input of those who're using browsers that have Alexa plugins or the relative few that put Alexa widgets on their sites. This means that Alexa is basing their statistics on a very small percentage of people.
The relationship was pointed out comparing Alexa's internet statistics to the use of Arbitron's ratings in Radio Marketing and Advertising. The problem there is that Arbitron's ratings as far as I understand, are worth as little or even less than Alexa's internet traffic data.
Like Alexa, Nielson tv ratings are also based on the input of a very small percentage of viewers, a very incomplete data set and in my opinion, not at all representative of what MOST people want to watch.
Because of this, I have to say that Neither of them are worth the time it takes to look up their information. I've also come to the conclusion that page rank isn't worth spending a whole lot of time worrying about. Although I have to admit that at least it is based on a much larger data set and a set of rules for calculating it that don't involve using a few people to guess what the rest of us are doing.
As for advertisers using Alexa as a metric to determine how much traffic a site gets, that's nothing but ignorance that could be cured if there could be a way found to educate people concerning just how unreliable Alexa is and how easily people have been able to game it. (yeah, I know that Alexa changed their system somewhat recently to make gaming the system harder but don't believe for one second that they've even made a significant dent in the number of people successfully gaming the system.
Using that kind of incomplete, inaccurate information means that you'll never get the best out of your advertising dollar.
Technorati Tags: website traffic, advertising, pagerank, nielson, traffic measure, web statistics, alexa
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