Manipulating Alexa Traffic Rankings

[mandy]

With the launch of Alexadex “share trading” and more and more sites using Alexa rankings as a way to judge their popularity (mostly because it is the only alternative); especially for ad selling, I thought it would be nice to revisit the manipulation of Alexa, an Amazon.com company. Alexa rankings are based on the amount of times users with the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers visit a web site over a given amount of time.

Most publishers share an unspoken agreement that although Alexa stats are inaccurate, that Alexa is not that far off and its traffic ranking system does give publishers an idea of how they compare with others...

Alexa is also apparently quite easy to manipulate...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3044

[jezebel]

People really pay $300 monthly for a better ranking?  :

[bargainbloodhound]

Alexa ranks sites based on the use of the Alexa Toolbar which is only available for Internet Explorer and is only used by 7% of the Internet using community. Thus, making the Alexa ranks/trends not very accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet

I can think of a few small auction sites that I know manipulate the numbers...including one that was encouraging its users to download and use the Alexa toolbar last year. Their ranking climbed to 16,000 for a short period.

[mandy]

Another article on Alexa's problems but first an example  

TulipTools is a prime example of Alexa's highly inaccurate traffic readings.  Actual September 2006 page views were 3.4 times higher than December 2005 yet TT's Alexa ranking fell sharply - not coincidentally the percentage of TT visitors using Firefox increased sharply during that period (the Alexa toolbar tracks Internet Explorer users only)

TT December '05: 73,000 pages views, 3-month Alexa rank 40,000
TT September '06: 246,000 page views, 3-month Alexa rank 74,000

What does a high Alexa rating mean to a web master? It shouldn’t mean that much as it’s not accurate. Alexa is a website that tracks a website’s traffic history, and gives a ranking based upon the number of visitors. However the fact that it requires a tool bar to work flaws it in many ways.

Apparently the folks at Alexa have never heard of any other browser besides Internet Explorer and FireFox. This seems quite unprofessional coming from a company owned by Amazon.com.

What’s the problem with this you ask? Well the results are skewed - totally inaccurate. For instance if you look up the ranking for msn.com they are ranked #2. Now on a default installation of Windows XP, which is what the majority of people use; MSN is the homepage for Internet Explorer. All those IE users going to the MSN homepage gives MSN an unfair advantage. Take a site like Slashdot or Digg, with their user base being an incredible ~76% FireFox users. IE users on those sites are few and far between, and the Alexa tool bar and IE users are even more uncommon...

full article: http://cyber-knowledge.net/blog/2006/10/...awed-idea/