Alexa rankings are a function of how many visitors to your site have an Alexa toolbar installed on their browser.

In the real world Alexa rankings mean nothing.

Don't spend a lot of time on this issue, it has an ROI of next to nothing.

KJ

Actually Alexa rankings below 30,000 or so are quite accurate. The lower the Alexa ranking, the more accurate they become.

Many potential advertisers, potential JV partners and potential buyers will look at the Alexa ranking. They know that Alexa ranking can be manipulated and that it is highly inaccurate in the millions range.

An Alexa ranking of 400,000 and an Alexa ranking of 4,000,000 could mean the exact same amount of traffic. But an Alexa ranking of 19,000 absolutely DOES get more traffic than an Alexa rankiing of 190,000. In that range, it is MUCH more accurate.

When you get in the range of 5,000 on Alexa, it is accurate enough for the above groups of people to put a high value on the accuracy of the Alexa rank.

With that said, it is a better question to ask how to dramatically increase the amount of traffic to your site from the 1,000 daily visitors you get to 5,000 daily visitors that you want.

You have traffic. Leverage it. Ad swaps with other high traffic sites is one form of leverage. Enlisting the help of your visitors as potential affiliates or in some other way is another excellent form of leverage. Use the traffic you have to get more traffici.

And if Alexa rankings are so easy to manipulate.... why don't you two take the #1 spot away from Google or Yahoo or whoever has it this week?

You can't, because the lower the Alexa ranking, the harder it is to manipulate. If Alexa really was easy to manipulate even with very low rankings, then you would constantly see porn sites and other junk sites floating around with the top 10. You don't because the top 100 sites are EXTREMELY accurate on Alexa. Even the top 1,000 or top 10,000 sites are very, very accurate.

The inaccuracy problems come with a low sample rate for low traffic sites. The lower the traffic, the lower the sample rate and the more inaccurate the Alexa rank.

Don't just pipe out the same answers as everyone else. Think for yourself first.

[DELETED]

I have my sites at ~100k. They are pretty good.
Do not bother about Alexa. Just work on the content
and SEO.