Alexa is Amazon owned website that tracks a website’s traffic history, and gives a ranking based upon the number of visitors using Alexa toolbar, A9 Toolbar and other web tools. 

As blogger John Chow recently mentioned in his argument about Alexa, the main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If your website visitors do not have the toolbar running, they do not affect the rankings of your sites. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to game. If you could get a few friends or employees to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday, you can break into top 100,000. Another problem with Alexa is that a large number of its toolbar users are in the online marketing, SEO or web publishingr business, giving sites which attract such audiences higher rankings.

So, what does a high Alexa rating mean to a webmaster? We all know that Alexa ranking lacks in accuracy.  Then why you should care about Alexa Rankings?

Well, there are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa rankings seriously. Stuart at PimpMyPageRank recently posted that if you want to sell ad space of your website through services like Text-Link-Ads, you need a better Alexa Ranking and Google PR. There are many online shoppers who are still very skeptical of where they’re going to shop on the internet. So they usually follow the others and use ratings like Alexa, Google pagerank or other traffic rankers to perceive the value of your site. 

In short, the Alexa ranking system is naturally flawed and can be easily manipulated. But the better you’re ranked in Alexa, the more business you’ll get; because the user will trust your website and feel very confident in dealing with you.  So it is definitely worth to go for a higher ranking in Alexa.

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