No, in fact, they are a terrible indicator of how good or bad a sites traffic is. I would even go so far as to say they are made up (that how unreliable they are). Just yesterday I had someone tell me they saw my site stats on Alexa. I had to explain how those stats were not real and should be used for nothing…unless of course your goal is to have rank on Alexa. Most of us in the SEO world would laugh at these stats but there are those that are not familiar with the process so I figured I would explain. So here is why (and this is a direct quote from Alexa):

“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. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site…Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable. Conversely, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes.” Source

So what does that mean? It means that Alexa can only track websites data from people who are using the Alexa toolbar on their browser. Do you use the toolbar? I know I never have. You have to manually install it, it does not come with your browser and its just bloatware. Alexa reminds me of the app on facebook that tells me who has viewed my profile. That app can only track people who also have the app installed – making it useless because no one installs those apps just like no one installs the Alexa toolbar. So who does install the Alexa toolbar? Internet marketers, that’s who. They install it and then visit their sites many times from different ip addresses which then increases their rank. And in order to track mobile stats users again need to download/install the toolbar.

So is there a way to get accurate website data? Yes, but it involves having access to your own server and installing software on it. That way you are tracking data directly from your server, usually via CGI, not some toolbar that you hope others have on their web browser. One example is AWstats.

Try to a SEO experts… If your business is searching for a proven, boutique and specialist SMG Melbourne Agency small enough to care, and one that represents growth motivated small to medium businesses

Anyway, thats my rant on these types of stats, for more info visit:

Alexa

wikipedia on Alexa

Here is a test of Alexa vs real stats

An article about why these stats are useless