Everybody(at least I think most do at this point) realizes that Alexa isn’t a reliable source of information at this point. Sites that have a high amount of internet savvy visitors are going to be ranked higher(although I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would actually want the toolbar installed). Take 2 of our sites in Bloggy Network for example. On one hand we have Blog Top Sites, which receives a lot of visitors who are owners of blogs and websites. On the other hand, we have celebrific, which gets your regular SE traffic as well as day to day type-ins from people looking for celebrity news. They both receive virtually the same amount of visitors averaged out over a certain period of time(celebrific fluctuates a whole lot more). Anyway, look at the graph below:

Celebrific ranks over 80,000 and BlogTopSites ranks about 8,000. Inaccurate? You bet. When comparing sites on different topics at least. What it is *fairly* reliable at is when comparing 2 sites on the same topics. Yes, I know the whole system can be gamed if a website owner cares enough to devote his time and energy to inflating his Alexa ranking. When it comes down to it though, the competitors that I actually care about comparing one of my sites against will(for the most part) have a reliable ranking in relation. There is no reason for the big boys on the internet to game alexa because they’ve created a good ranking by doing the things that matter.

It is fun to compare rankings, I do it all the time to see how we stack up, people should know it just shouldn’t be taken too seriously.