A web browser toolbar provided by a subsidiary of Amazon that ranks other sites’ traffic and page views based on visits from users with the Alexa toolbar installed.

The main function of this toolbar is to gauge a web site’s ‘ranking’ which is generated using the information gathered by the toolbars (users surfing the net with the toolbar installed on their browser).

There are millions of web surfers using this toolbar, but it seems that the majority of them are individuals that work on web sites, which in turn, makes this toolbar somewhat inaccurate.

For example: There are sites that show an Alexa ranking/rating of 36,000 (ranked among the top 36,000 web sites in the world) and these sites might get over 20,000 visits per day to it. Then there are ‘Webmaster’ type portals with only 10,000 visits per day that have a ‘better’ Alexa ranking of 15,000 (among the top 15,000 sites online) even though they don’t get as much traffic.

This happens because most of the people that visit ‘Webmaster’ resource portals (or similar sites) are more likely to have the tool bar installed, while most other (non-webmaster related) sites will get visits from people that do ‘not’ have this toolbar installed.

You will find that many of the sites with high Alexa ratings (rankings) are usually sites that are frequented by the ‘Internet’ workforce and not necessarily the average web surfer so use the data you get from Alexa, but understand that its is not a totally accurate measurement of a web sites popularity.

To get a better idea of what a web site’s rating is you should combine ‘different’ rating services like:

• Ranking.Com
• Compete.Com

These are also very similar to Alexa, but between the different services you should be able to get a better idea of how popular a web site really is.

The Alexa tool serves as a good gauge to see a web site’s ‘trend’ patterns have been, more so than the site’s rating.

Do you know your web site’s Alexa ranking?