Are people manipulating their Alexa rankings?

[jharris387]

Recently, I’ve tried to check the traffic rankings of a few popular websites at ale*xa, traffic*estimate and also stats*brain. It seems to me that many marketers are manipulating their rankings so that nobody can even get an estimate of how much traffic their sites are receiving?

It clearly appears to me that they are deliberately doing this to prevent competitors from gaining insight? Is this really happening, or is there something I’m missing?

For example: I have noticed that some traffic estimate sites, will estimate a popular web site as only having 137 daily visitors. But, I’m absolutely positive, that the web sites daily traffic, measures in the 1000’s.

Is it possible for a webmaster to sabotage their web site traffic rankings at various traffic estimate sites?

Can someone please explain?

And, if they are doing this, where can I find out how to do it as well?

Thanks in advance.

J. Harris - jharris387 at gmail

P.S. Oh, to be very clear, my question is “not” about how webmasters are trying to improve their ale*xa rankings.

[Colin Palfrey]

Originally Posted by jharris387

And, if they are doing this, where can I find out how to do it as well?

Love it

I had software before that went through hundreds of proxys and pinged my site. It drove my Alexa score till it looked like I was up there with Google.

Pointless though so I stopped using it

[KirkMcD]

Originally Posted by jharris387

For example: I have noticed that some traffic estimate sites, will estimate a popular web site as only having 137 daily visitors. But, I’m absolutely positive, that the web sites daily traffic, measures in the 1000’s.

Is it possible for a webmaster to sabotage their web site traffic rankings at various traffic estimate sites?

You can raise it but you can't really lower it at Alexa. I don't know who the other sites you mentioned estimate traffic, so I can't speak about them.

At Alexa it mainly records the traffic of people who use the Alexa Toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar tends to only be installed by people in IM. So IM sets tend to skew higher.

[Kevin McNally]

Years ago one of my sites started increasing alexa ranking on a massive sacle despite the fact there was no increase in unique visitors, I was puzzled until I found an ad tracking link which was screwed up on my server and kept refreshing the page by mistake thousands of times per day.

I doubt it's this easy now to manipulate alexa rankings but there are other ways so I take no notice of alexa rankings. I can think of at least 50 friends and family who are online and nobody has heard of alexa and have never installed the toolbar.

[Dan C. Rinnert]

Originally Posted by KirkMcD

You can raise it but you can't really lower it at Alexa. I don't know who the other sites you mentioned estimate traffic, so I can't speak about them.

Yes, you can. You just stop doing what you were doing to inflate it.