Webmasters are always interested in how much traffic a competitors site gets and how they rate relative to a competitor. Trying to determine a competitors traffic is not really possible, so there is a need to rely on other sources. One source that some webmasters look to is the Alexa rankings. Alexa have a toolbar that over a million users have installed and they collect data on the sites they visit to come up with a ordered ranking of the sites based on how much traffic that get from the toolbar users. A number of webmasters use to information to compare their sites with others.
Unfortunately the Alexa Ranking is not of much use. No search engines use it to help them rank sites. Comparing your site to that of your competitors is of not much use for a number of reasons. The users of the toolbar tend to be webmasters interested in the rank of their site or are more technically orientated people. These people are not representative of the general web user, so the Alexa ranking will be biased toward the type of sites that these sorts of people visit. Webmaster sites do well in the Alexa rankings as they are visited often by webmasters with the tool bar installed. The other reason that the toll is not useful as it is so easy to manipulate. If a webmaster wants to improve their Alexa ranking, they just need to install the toolbar and visit the site a number of times a day and it will improve. So if you want to compare your site to another, you do not know your ranking as its been inflated due to you visiting it and you do not know if the webmaster of the other site has the toolbar in their browser or not. There are even services available for a fee to visit your site to inflate the Alexa ranking.
The Alexa ranking is not of much use. It is too easy to manipulate and is calculated from a biased sample.
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