I am behind you Robert! Looking to see how the experiment works. There is another thread -> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=136341 with some heated debate about manipulation of Alexa.
What does that have to do with the question "Can Alexa be manipulated"? To "trust" a measure, those that use is need to have confidence that the measure is not easily manipulated. If Alexa is easy to manipulate, then Amazon could put some more effort into improving Alexa. And that would be a marvel.
I'v assumed for a long time that Alexa can be manipulated, but that it's quite hard to do above a certain ranking threshold. It would be useful to have more information about roughly where this threshold is, both for those of us who like to know how well we are doing compared to other sites, and for people who use Alexa data to help them make advertising and purchasing decisions. Can you fake an Alexa rank of 40 000? What about 4000? These are valid questions, and having research that answers them would help ordinary users, and not just people who are planning to cheat the system.
Obelia - exactly my thoughts - especially what level is "difficult" vs "easy" to manipulate a ranking to.
Alexa on his toolbar have a spyware, tracking cookie for know what webs are you visit and make his rank.
did u have the alexa toolbar installed? because if not then u just wasted time. alexa rankings only count those ppl with the alexa toolbar.
Alexa has one purpose, to post accurate ranking. They are aware of the fake and cheating methods. They do not work. Alexa is on top of things
Everyone just be very careful if you are going to try this out and if you have adsense on that site because you are artifically inflating adsense impressions. You can get your account banned very easily if you do this. If you want to fake alexa... Install their toolbar and set your site as homepage after some time your site will atleast be under 100k
Alexa doesn't update everyday so you'll have to wait to see if it has any effect. Does alexa really log ip's because I'm sure none of my visitors use it and my ranks pretty good, and even when I diddn't have any visitors my rank slowly decreased/ (increased?), as I use it. But yeah I'm pretty sure adsense won't be too happy about it, seems like a pointless risk, do it on a site with no adsense.
No matter how many times you reload the page, it will still only counted as one. I'm happier to see my Alexa ranking improve itself. It update quite fast, not like the PageRank that takes ages. My blog's Alexa was 4million+, and it improve every week, and now it's only 222k.
this is silly. Alexa does update it's rankings for bigger sites daily, smaller sites not as much. And refreshing the alexa page isn't going to do anything. From Alexa.com:
Thank goodness there are others that see that Alexa "manipulation" is pure silliness. No one has been able to show me a capability to manipulate Alexa.
Disclaimer: I tested this as a little experiment with a domain that I had sitting around. I DID NOT DO IT FOR PERSONAL GAIN. I did this a few months ago so I can't say if it works anymore. You must do it every day or else your ranking goes down. It's totally useless. What you have to do is get apache and pHP, I used instantrails, then you edit your hosts file to make your comp think that your local ip is the ip of your domain. Then all you need is a simple page with the javascript refresh, and you'll save bandwidth. This method worked a few months ago, but I'm not sure if it works anymore. Also, I tend to see domains that I work on for administration purposes go up to 900k in alexa from just me going to phpmyadmin, and other admin scripts for work. I've tested this and it worked, but again, I can't say that it does any longer. EDIT: Also getting your alexa rank to any low number is next to impossible this way. The whole idea for personal gain is utterly nuts. I wouldn't do it again.
i would say no need to fake alexa rank, just get backlinks. Buy links , banners it will increase the popularity of site, and you will get natural traffic. About alexa updating daily... it updates daily for my site, but i dont know if my site is considered a big site its only 70k