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Old 08-24-2007, 07:52 AM
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Yankidank Yankidank is offline
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From what I understand Alexa gets its stats from a large amount of people who have installed an alexa, or alexa partner, toolbar. That toolbar reports back to Alexa.com the users browsing history and then those numbers are put in a database for traffic statistics. This results in a higher ranking for US sites because the toolbar is more commonly used in America than other countries. Even though Alexa isn't totally accurate, and in some cases way off, it's still a good "guestimating" method for rating websites on traffic. There have been several published studies that have even compared alexa.com traffic stats to the real traffic stats for high ranking sites, and it wasn't that far off. You shouldn't base a site entirely based on it's alexa.com rating, but it's a fairly good method for ranking sites as long as you consider the stats as "iffy".

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