Alexa / PR ratings

[Humous]

Another question for you all, does the Alexa rank/rating mean anything to you? Since I've been keeping any eye on my company website (almost 2 months now) I've seen a rise in our rating from (I can't actually remember what it started at but think it was around 1.4 Million) to 734 Thousand.

It's a CGI (perl) generated site so lots of main.cgi?var1=xxx&var2=xxxx which I've replaced a lot of with /func/var2.html type links (using Melkiors htaccess article) which I gather is more search engine friendly, I've also submitted a sitemap although not a good one and tweaked the keyword and title tags.

I messed up a couple of times, both were the result of an unset variable I was using and easily fixed but I did get a chance to see what effect they had on our rating in Alexa, the 1st saw a drop of 10k and the 2nd 26k, Google Webmaster tools highlighted the issue as bad urls which is how I found out. I just wish these two tools updated more often.

It's not really a high traffic site though.

I guess the same reasoning applies to why I can't seem to get above page rank 5 seemingly no matter how many articles we put out.

Are Alexa rank and page rank related? I assume if you increase one you should increase the other, though not necessarily proportionatly?

I realise that on their own neither of these figures mean much, I'm mearly using them as a guide so that I can "see" what effect my changes are having.

I only started all this in an attempt to get the extra links under ours in Google (like sections of the site, I can't remember the technical term), still not figured that one out. Still it's been interesting and I fully intend to keep at it.

Humous

[temi]

Humous,
Alexa is not a respected measure of traffic, in the first instance, it does not record visitors who do not have Alexa plugin and I think that is probably over 80% of internet users (AOL users and FF users don't have alexa plugin) so a measure of traffic that ignores that large a population cannot be taken seriously.
Its is also very easy to abuse as all you need to do is get a few people with Alexa plugin to visit you site several time a days and you Alexa ranking will shoot up to high heavens.
Alexa raking and PR have nothing in common and one does not affect the other. PR has more credibility than Alexa though.
I am yet to come across a webmaster who is happy with his/her traffic or PR but I think PR5 is very very good PR for your website and just keep on writing and distributing you article and not forgetting participating in forums like this and you PR will rise eventually.
Thanks

[Humous]

Thanks Temi,

Down to the good ol' "get sites to link to mine", better keep at it.

Humous

[temi]

Yes you better do and while you are are it, I have a few sites I can link to you from (in the hope that you will link to me as well

If you are interested, send me a PM and we will see how we can help one another.