I wanted to see if Alexa rank could be manipulated so I got a few people from Digital Point to let me browse their site every day with the Alexa toolbar installed. There wasn't a big change, but every site's Alexa rank went down at least by 300,000. Most of these sites were in the 1,500,000 + range. Many of them are now going down less than 1,000,000 and continue to go down daily. Most of their 1-week averages are around 300,000 (the 1-week averages were also in the 1,000,000 range before I started surfing them). Here is the graph of the sites: The arrow is about when I started visiting the sites. Obviously there wasn't a huge change, but it leads me to believe that if there were 5 people doing the same thing I was doing on one of these sites it would be a significant change.
Yeah, there are many articles about this. I also tried this. I got all my staff on my site to install the toolbar as well as some loyal members and the results were significant. I went from 100k+ to in the top 20k.
yes. Your correct! this is old news unfortunately Alexa is a POS. Almost totally worthless unless your ranking is in the top 20,000 and then it becomes harder to fake a ranking. if your top 1000 Alexa sites your site is BIG, endof Dont waste time with Alexa, it brings no traffic and is only of marginal use for selling a domain or selling advertising. However anyone worth their salt will ask for a lot more than Alexa as proof......
Top 20K? If you can do that you should sell it as a service in the Buy Sell and Trade section... I know Alexa rank doesn't matter that much but it does add value in the eyes of advertisers and it probably will draw more people to your website. I would pay for that if it was a fair price
Hi ... yep, Alexa relatively easy to manipulation. Alexa admits to using "too small" and biased samples -- not caring, of course -- for sites 100,000+; a little more strident for sites under 100,000. Look around DP, there's a thread, with an interesting response, to a DP user, about its methods.