One of the imperfect metrics that webmasters and would be advertisers use (outside of raw Google Analytics data) and Google PageRank is the Alexa rating of a site.  For a listing of the top sites in the world you can go here: Alexa Ratings

Alexa.com has made a business out of providing metrics to the marketplace on various sites.  Alexa’s data is aggregated from several sources, one of which is (I believe) the alexa toolbar.

The Alexa ranking of a site, is the ranking of a site’s popularity among all web surfers.

As you can see from the above link, Google.com is #1 (duh)

What’s kind of cool, is that you can individual searches for sites like corporateraiter.com on the site by doing a search.  For CorporateRaiter’s alexa.com rank you can go here CorporateRaiter Alexa Rank

Madness!

According to alexa.com corporate raiter is among the top 300k sites WORLDWIDE.  And, ranked 82,977 in the US.

C’mon.

There have to be at least 83,000 porn sites that are more popular than Corporate Raiter.

In fact, I have some blogs on other topics that get more traffic that haven’t even broken the top 1MM on Alexa’s rating scale.  While I’m not complaining, I wanted to point this out since I mentioned it as one of the criteria that I would be tracking as part of my dofollow experiment.

On that measure I would have to say that the dofollow experiment was a smashing success.

As far as PageRank goes (a criminally lagging indicator) I had much better results on some subpages of mine using another technique.  I’m going to do some more experimenting to see if I can narrow down the specific reason that this “other” technique had so much success in getting pagerank *quickly*.  One of my posts actually has a pagerank of 4, and another has a pagerank of 3.

Let me know what you think about the alexa algorithm and your experiences with it?

Is Alexa worthwhile at all, or just a tool to dupe unsuspecting newbs in the Internet space?

Sound off.  Leave a comment.  It’s dofollow.