[imgv94]

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...brforum.com%2F

[Santo]

Over 7% of SBRForum traffic comes from the Netherland Antilles, 26% from Costa Rica, and 3% from (my second home) Cyprus.

Very interesting stats actually. Would suggest that almost half of the traffic here is industry traffic rather than customers.

[imgv94]

It has to be.. Same thing for the other forums as well..

[Sean]

Over 7% of SBRForum traffic comes from the Netherland Antilles, 26% from Costa Rica, and 3% from (my second home) Cyprus. Very interesting stats actually. Would suggest that almost half of the traffic here is industry traffic rather than customers.

No doubt that this and other forums generate a significant amount of traffic from within the industry itself. However, Alexa rankings are not entirely accurate.

One of the issues with Alexa is the self-admitted biases inherent in their traffic rankings and overall methodologies:

Some Important Disclaimers

The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:

• Our users are disproportionately likely to visit sites that are featured on alexa.com such as amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be overcounted.

• The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of the various browsers is unknown. Alexa's sample includes users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla browsers. The AOL/Netscape and Opera browser is not supported, which means that sites operated by these companies may be undercounted.

• The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of various operating systems is unknown. Alexa sample includes toolbars built for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

• The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Chinese sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in China, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Chinese Alexa users.

• In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.

• The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages ("https"). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.

More >>>

[Bill Dozer]

Those stats aren't really close to what our reporting shows. I would guess the folks in the industry use the Alexa toolbar to help the rank on their own sites.

[imgv94]

Well what does your reporting show?

Seems like every website owner believes Alexa is shorting them.. Do you ever hear a website owner saying, Alexa is actually saying we have more traffic than we do?

[SBR_John]

img,
We use both our own stats from server logs and we use a service called Hitwise. I wouldnt mind if someone threw up some charts or stats. They dont let me look at those too much anymore.

We have a much larger Euro audience than Alexa indicates.

[Sean]

Seems like every website owner believes Alexa is shorting them.. Do you ever hear a website owner saying, Alexa is actually saying we have more traffic than we do?

The point is that Alexa themselves admit that their rankings and reports are not accurate (read the previous post again here and/or Alexa's own disclaimers at the bottom of this page).

Because of the geographic biases related to the adoption and use of the Alexa toolbar, smart website owners utilize more reliable means to measure the sources of their traffic. In web marketing circles, Alexa is no longer considered to be an accurate source of information; and, in fact, is often viewed as easy-to-manipulate.

We'll see if we can pull a more accurate report of SBR's demographics for "inquiring minds".

[JoshW]

I own a website outside of this industry and all the tech people who work on it use the Alexa bar and our stats with Alexa are much higher than they should be. This is just three people using the bar, but that is enough to inflate the rankings. So that is an example of a site that has too high a rank.

[Halo]

Haha it ranks 46th most popular site in the Netherlands thats awesome.

[raiders72002]

Alexa stats are easily manipulated. I hate to admit it but I used an Alexa boosting software that skyrocketed the ratings.

If asked I did show the real stats but didn't admit to anything unless asked.

[JoshW]

Yeah Raiders, one was using some software to ping the site and that shot up the ranking a lot. As you say, easily manipulated.

[cPaxus]

Interesting. Thanx.

[onlooker]

I have a alexa rank tool bar in my firefox browser. So I can see each sites rank. Its just a cool gauging tool.