For those of you who have the FireFox toolbar that displays pagerank, alexa and compete ranking (its called search status). I just want to know what the hell is the red dot that appears on the right of the alexa bar on some sites, because it seems to appear in a completely random pattern and no one seems to know what it is, any ideas?

A waste of time, as is anything to do with Alexa.

Care to elaborate Adam?

Okay...Alexa data is known to be flawed, since it's based off of a toolbar that primarily SEO wannabes run because it artificially inflates their Alexa rank, which in turn provides them with a false sense of accomplishment.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/thoughts-on-alexa-data/

Fair enough, I would agree that more SEO/marketing people use the toolbars to that degree and perhaps the same can be said about compete as its taken from a select group of people only residing in Northern America. But my question still stands (even if you think it is irrelevant) - what does that red dot signify?!

Graham I have search status installed and never noticed the red dot, but I'll keep an eye out for it. If you know a site or two where it shows let me know so I can take a look.

Adam I agree that Alexa is flawed, but I wouldn't say it's useless. I think you can still use it to some degree to show trends on a site. Granted the numbers they show have never matched up with what my server logs say, but for the most part both increase and decrease at the same time.

I think you can also make some comparisons between sites with similar topics. Webmaster and SEO sites are definitely skewed, but you can probably compare two webmaster related sites since they're likely skewed equally.

Of course I wouldn't use if for more than a quick comparison and sure there are going to be some that are manipulating their ranking, but I think you can still make some use of the data.

Overall I agree with you. It's highly skewed and no one should take any of the data literally.

Funnily enough its showing up in my toolbar on this very page, if not try the BBC website.

It's showing up on mine aswell, only random pages though :S

Alexa is waaaaaay to easily minipulated to be anything more than a v.quick checker!

I'm not sure what the dot is, but I realize now why I wasn't seeing it. I forgot that I turned off the Alexa part of search status when I installed the actual Alexa toolbar. d'oh!

hehe well I thought someone would of known, but the only things I can think of are: the fact that it shows at the top end of the bar, perhaps Alexa has the read the site recently, it's in a dmoz category or it has a lot of links being fed into the site. But no one knows for sure... will they ever? o_O

I saw something saying it stood for a single day, but it didn't really make sense in light of some of your observations. I never did find anything else about it.