Quote from NickBarings:
By the way , is www.alexa.com the best
place to check out the popularity of a
wesbite ?
Alexa is very accurate for high traffic sites...
Roughly the top 100,000 to 200,000 sites...
Any site that gets > 1000 hits/day will be pretty accurate.
The reason for inaccuracy...
Alexa measures only hits by people that have the Alexa toolbar installed...
Which I'm wild guessing to be maybe 3-5% of browsers.
So you are measuring the behavior of 3%...
Generally more techy, sophisticated users...
And then extrapolating to 100%.
Deadly accurate for top 10,000 sites...
But if you are #300,575 and get 300 visitors/day...
Alexa can be off by 100%... and show
100 or 600.
One thing it's good for...
Is to weed out good-looking sites...
That are really deadbeat businesses with near zero traffic...
And avoid such.