Is it possible to retrieve traffic information about a website without actually viewing their private server stats? Is it possible to "get an idea" about the level of a site's traffic in some way, form, or fashion? Let's say the owner of a website made me an 'offer' about purchasing a 125x125 pixel graphic ad spot on his website. How do I verify the traffic levels that he receives, so I will know if this is a good deal or if I'm being 'ripped' off?
Alexa ranking is one public method of viewing site traffic. But it wont be as accurate as something like google analysis or something related to that. Also if you are putting ads on someone else's site there's no shame to ask for "proof". If you notice around DP sales section everyone will ask for traffic or earning proof. So asking that webmaster for the same thing is your right. If they cannot provide you with proof then it's probably best to stay away. Also I know you're a regular on the young entrepreneur forums and you'll find lots of information here Edit: You can also use something like http://estibot.com/ to see how many backlinks the website has. The more the better.
Is there anyway to prevent Alexa [and other web tools like it] from profiling a website's traffic? In essence, if a website owner wanted to make sure that that his site's traffic could not even be estimated, what would he do?
Your best bet will be to only advertise on sites that show their stats screenshots. Another way will be to look at their comments to roughly estimate their traffic. Number of RSS feed subscribers can also be used as an estimation, provided you need to check the Image properties to see that it is valid. Faking Alexa is possible such as using redirects but stopping Alexa from knowing the stats is impossible I guess unless it is a blogspot blog or the site is new.
Quite frankly, there are so many possible websites for any marketer to advertise on that why would you give a second thought to using a site where you had the slightest doubt about their credibility. Legitimate business people are upfront with the sort of information that you're after, so if they're in any way reluctant to prove their traffic levels, there's probably a very good reason. They have something to hide. Forget about anything that looks at all dodgy and look elsewhere. I don't buy advertising any more, but when I used to, I bought a fixed number of visitors at a fixed rate, and was provided with an account that I could log into anytime I wanted to check the stats in real time. So I could cross check with my own tracking. That way I could tell if the results were similar enough to be legitimate.
Ok - my example about advertising on another site was just an illustration. The thrust of my question is this: How do you prevent 3rd party websites, like Alexa, Google, and Compete from gathering traffic data about your website? Someone had mentioned placing a security certificate on the website [encrypting the site], like Paypal. Is this true?
I got conflicting answers on this when I interviewed the big Webmasters. But they didn't seem to care. I mean, so what? If this concerns you, ask Google. Ask Paypal. Ask other such sites. You'd be surprised how much you can gather, just from asking.