- Alexa bases its Traffic Rank on traffic data from Alexa toolbar users and other sources. Sites with higher scores supposedly receive more traffic and are more important. Because a large part of the ranking depends on how many Alexa toolbar users visit a website, it is possible to install the toolbar, visit your website repeatedly and artificially boost your Alexa Traffic Rank. Thus this rank is very easy to manipulate. Most webmasters view Alexa Rank as a mild curiosity rather than an important metric.
- A website's search engine ranking, or "SEO rank" refers to the position of a site in search engine results for a given keyword. A site that appears first for a keyword has the highest possible ranking. Webmasters rely heavily on search engines for traffic, so SEO rank is extraordinarily important. A wide variety of factors such as the number of inbound links to a site and frequency of keywords on a website influence search engine rank. You can use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to manipulate these factors and gain a better ranking.
- A website's Alexa Traffic Rank has no impact on its position in search engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines each have a unique algorithm for determining position on results pages. Alexa is a separate entity from these search engines and calculates Traffic Rank using its own technology for informational purposes only. Therefore it has no impact on search engine rank whatsoever.
- Just because Alexa rank is easy to manipulate and has no impact on SEO does not mean it is completely useless. You can still use it to categorize websites based on traffic. Even with possible manipulation taken into account, a top-100 Alexa Rank website is clearly more popular than a site with a rank above 1,000 or even 1,000,000. As a site's Alexa rank improves, it becomes more difficult to obtain a better rank and thus manipulation is less common. This makes Alexa Traffic Rank useful for analyzing traffic trends on the most popular websites.