Alexa Ranking Sites

[SEODinosaur]

I found these two sites giving my competitor link juice:

http://www.webnamelist.com/alexa/Alexa_186.html

http://www.list-of-domains.org/alexa/Alexa_185.html

I have seen these sites before and I just dont get why they are authoritative.

The funny thing is I did a search for my competitors link on the page and its not showing up, is this a problem in site explorer? Why is site explorer mentioning these sites as my competitions best links when these links do not exist on their site?

[SL_SEM]

It looks like those sites update the alexa rankings of the sites they list daily. This means that where a site shows up on those lists will change based on when the site did their scrape, and when alexa updated their information.

The information you see in open site explorer is then based on when OSE did their last crawl of the list sites.

I think open site explorer releases a new index monthly (I could be wrong on that) so it would make sense that it doesn't keep up with a site changing its page content daily.

As for link juice, I wouldn't give those sites much weight in terms of prioritizing link targets for your site.

They seem to exist mostly to serve ads which pretty much flies in the face of what google's leaked document about rating guidelines notes:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/16-insights-into-googles-rating-guidelines