Most of us know that Alexa Rankings are (terribly) flawed, but those of us that advertise still depend on them due to sites like ReviewMe, PayPerPost, and Text Link Ads still using them to determine how much we make from our advertising efforts. It sucks, but we don’t really have a choice.

Your site was ranked by how many people are using the Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and visit your site. This data was compared to every other site and then given a ranking (a rank of 300,000 meant that your site is the 300,000th most visited site on the internet.) That sucks for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it didn’t count Firefox, Safari, or any other browsers. How fair is that to someone that writes a Mac Blog? Not very, that’s how. Most people that would visit their site are using Safari. You get the point…

Anyway, a great new(ish) Firefox and Mozilla extension is available called SearchStatus. When you install it, it displays the Google and Alexa rankings for each site you visit, and it also reports visits back to Alexa. Hopefully this helps even-out the playing field a little bit, although it only works in FireFox and Mozilla; Safari and other browsers are not supported yet.

As you can see, it also has many useful tools available for webmasters. I personally use it a lot more than I thought I would. Being able to check backlinks, highlight the dreadful “nofollow” links, check whois data and keyword density has proved to be invaluable. The point is, I highly recommend that people use this awesome Firefox extension, and if you aren’t already using Firefox, then shame on you

Even if you are still using Internet Explorer, be sure to go to the Alexa Toolbar download page and install the toolbar. Hopefully this will help get more accurate Alexa results.

If you don’t already, I want to recommend all of my readers to get:

SearchStatus

and