[Note to mods: not sure where this post should go...?]
I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with the amount of people that use Alexa ranking as some sort of measure of the "worth/ popularity" of a site.
I have experimented with their "toolbar" for some time and the inconsistencies are so glaringly obvious that I cannot imagine any practical use for the ranking at all.
When I use the toolbar my site jumps up to ~25/30k rank, when I do not use it my site falls to <100k. Where is the value in this?
[I notice this most recently on Text Link Ads Inc.
http://www.text-link-ads-inventory.com/1to100.html
Mostly, as far as I can tell, it is used my webmasters solely to increase their "ranking" on Alexa, obviously at the expense of submitting their every day web use to Amazon's spywear. I know this, and probably everyone who is likely to be reading this does also, so in my eye's it's just a con for those that do not follow SEO (I use the term liberally) in any depth. By using Alexa rank, is the SEO "industry" just alienating itself more from the vast majority of "real" internet users?
Who uses the Alexa toolbar? And why? And do you really think that the benefits outweigh the dissadvantages of having your every online move tracked?