I think webmasters have widely viewed the Alexa rankings as meaningless for a long time now. The rankings are very easy to "game" and the the toolbar usage among the general public is minimal.

I was reading a post at one of my favorite Search Engine forums today that really illustrated how minimal that use is. The post was not about Alexa but the reference was made as a comment on tracking traffic.

The writer has a site that generates tons of traffic from a group that would be representative of the general population and out of 600,000 visitors just 60 were using the Alexa Toolbar (which is where the Alexa rankings come from)

So, if you have clients that are worried because someone told them they had a poor Alexa rank - pass that tidbit along to them

On the other hand, if everybody on this forum would install this toolbar, then that would artifitialy inflate alexa ranking for memebers website(s).

Alexa rank is one of those things that are useful to some and pointless to others. I find it a useful estimation of my site popularity with certain user groups since I do not pad it and it is a natural reflection of the toolbar users. I also do not disregard anything that, for all I know could be used now or in the future as a deciding factor in something or other. My favorite things about alexa info though are site reviews and like links. Creating surf webs are just so much fun.... almost as fun as social search.

Have you tried ranking.com? I use Alexa often -- however I think she is often wrong.

Q...

A lot of people use Alexa rankings, but I find that Google's PageRank is much more useful. It is the most widely used search engine in the world. Google's PageRank is more concrete and specific, whereas, Alexa is more of an arbitrary number.
For an unbiased overview of Alexa, go to our Web Marketing Insights Blog .
For more information about Google PageRank, go to The Marketing Shop .

Googles pagerank is concrete and specific Jennifer...I know your new and trying to help but please take a deep breath

That and I saw absolutely no information on page rank with the link that you provided.