Quote:
Originally Posted by redwhiteandblue
I keep saying this but I'll say it again.
Alexa does not know how much traffic you have. It just takes a rough guess based on (as far as I can tell) your inbound links, the number of pages on your site, and the keywords it can find that you rank for. The smaller your site, the rougher the guess.
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Well they have way more data than that. They pull real world data from all the users of the Alexa toolbar, and supposedly lots of other browser extensions. Then they use that sample data to estimate the total amount of visitors -- not unlike how election polls work.
They might even use some more data from other sources - from different devices, routers, DNS servers? Who knows. After all they have Amazon behind them now.
As you said, the less visitors the site has, the less accurate the ranking will be. (Unless you actually give them access to your site's data.)
Anyway, what my post was about is that they might have changed their algo that calculates their rankings lately, which seems to have had a negative effect on many adult sites that didn't lose any traffic in reality.