Why Alexa rank grows so fast?

I have owned Open Directory for about 20 days and few days ago(Dec 2nd 2006) I have posted a thread called "Alexa Rank: 296,930 Free Directory welcome submission." here, at that time, its alexa rank is only 296,930, but it has growed to 196,007 now!

why?

 

I would not put too much belief in the results A can be easily boosted by many ways which are familiar to most of the webmasters
Ratings below 100,000 are subject to wild fluctuations
When ratings get above 100,000 a limited degree of accuracy is relevant

 

I have a non-webmaster site that ranks at 297,712. Thats pretty good for me.

 

Alexa rankings are not very credible IMHO.

 

if the alexa rank is 23k - then they are relevent or not ..? alexa 23k is good or not ..?

 

Many webmasters would install alexa toolbar to check its data, that helps your directory get high rank in few days.

So don't be confused about that

 

By the way, what data does the alexa toolbar show? anything useful?

 

It is not so useful now, you can easily get 100k rank by installing the toobar to visit your sites.

It depends on how many people who installed alexa toolbar visited your site.

 

Unless your moving up 1000 when ur down from 5000 ... it means almost nothing;p

 

Alexa ranking is based on pageviews of people with Alexa toolbar installed on their PC. (practically, it's mostly webmasters and IE users - Alexa toolbar doesn't have a FF version).

Whenever you work too much on your website (update it and refresh your browser) the ranking goes up. It's that simply.

So basically unless your Alexa ranking is very low, you can completely ignore it.

 

but the people over at text-link-ads put some importance to it... so if you're selling links over there, it matters...

 

True, there are still people who think it is important. So there would be a new reason to get higher Alexa ranking ==> Convince dumb advertisers that your site is good (when it could simply be that you refresh your page 10000 times a day)

lol

 

Multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview.

 

I'm using FF now to manage my site. so it wasn't caused by me...

 

For a directory, that's not an Alexa rank to be surprised about. A lot of directory visitors are webmasters who have the toolbar installed, and that is likely to push the rank up quite a bit.

 

even firefox has a very attractive alexa toolbar plugin now to add value to alexa ranking

Search Status: A Search Extension for Firefox and Mozilla
with many additional useful features for surfers and webmasters

 

getting into 200,000 is easy but it gets exponentially (not proportionally) more difficult the higher the ranking. Jumping from 200,000 to 100,000 is much more difficult than jumping from 300,000 to 200,000