Alexa Rank - should I be paying attention?

Welcome to the constantly changing world of SEO!

For your sites, Alexa's rank is of little value as with any analytics package you'll be receiving accurate, not estimated, usage information.  As some of the posts indicate, Alexa's calculations and reality don't always match up (according to Alexa, Facebook surpassed MySpace a few months ago for traffic--which is completely inaccurate).  I recently blogged about changes to Alexa's rankings you may be interested in.

no  -

Unless you're selling ads on the site in question  -

If you are, the buyers of the ads will want to see a better Alexa ranking  - (even though you and I know it doesn't matter)

IMO... no

too often i have seen our traffic increasing (from log files/google analytics etc), but according to Alexa our traffic is dropping (and so too our rank).

years ago i used to track it versus competitors but dont concern myself with it now.

Clay is right. Go by the real data in your log files whether you're using Clicktracks, Google Analytics, Omniture, etc. I would put Compete in the same category as this. If you are going to use that, make sure you're collecting your own demographic information to compare.

Alexa rank can be handy as this is a way that outsiders who can't view the amount of hits in your server can see your traffic volume. The Alexa ranking is a bit misleading though, because a person needs to have the Alexa Toolbar installed in order for Alexa to calculate the traffic.

I heared the announcement that alexa has changed its ranking algorithm. I am little happy with this change because my website got little improvment. see new alexa ranking for http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in Fortune Park Hotels Ltd.