There are many ways to determine traffic to a website, but the only reliable way is the data that the site owners can access. You cannot tell how much traffic a competitors sites is getting unless you can access that information. Some webmasters like to use the Alexa Website Rankings to determine traffic that a website might be getting. Alexa use a toolbar that users install in their web browser, so when they visit a page, this information is sent to Alexa who use it for their Alexa rankings. Unfortunately the information is flawed for 2 reasons:
1. Only more technologically orientated people use the toolbar, so the results are biased towards the websites that these people tend to visit
2. They are easy to manipulate. You can increase the Alexa Ranking of your own site by visiting it several times a day with the toolbar installed, or even better, have some friends do the same thing. So, if you are trying to determine the Alexa ranking of a competitors website, you do not know if it is artificially increased due to this sort of activity or not.
Even with all this, the Alexa rankings do not count for anything. They are not factored into any search engine results. At best, the Alexa Website ranking should be used as entertainment and not for any serious metric of website performance.
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