| Brent Hanson - LASIKFRAUD.com 2004-12-16, 7:11 pm |
| 1) Alexa rankings are absolutely meaningless. Alexa even publicly admits
that any rankings above the 100,000 mark are worthless.
2) Alexa officially gets its rankings from a SPYWARE toolbar users must
intentionally install on their browser.
3) It is a fairly simply matter for a web master to skew the rankings. I
once manipulated the rankings of my own site for a few days for
entertainment. Don't believe it? Here are some quotes from web master
forums.
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http://forums.searchenginewatch.com...18741#post18741
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"Alexa Rankings are even easier to manipulate than SE ones. Install the bar
on your site and set it as your home page. Also, there are companies that
actually "sell" it by operating auto-click solutions."
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http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/18211-3-10.htm
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"If you want to be in the top 100 it is easy. All you need is a coputer with
a macro program on it. Have it surf through your site all day long. You can
add several other computers and you will rock. It does not care if it is
from the same IP. "
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http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/4964.htm
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"alexa rankings are totally useless. They are easily manipulated with
scripts and are on a daily basis.(to make it look like a website gets more
traffic than it really does)"
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http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156775
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yea, alexa rank is completely capable of manipulation. I know a site where
two of the staff using the toolbar raised the rank from a 18,000 to 2,000.
"I hate alexa... It's got all my sites so wrong... I can't believe ANYONE
takes it as accurate. If google did a thing like this or yahoo, the big
toolbars, we might believe it, but how many people have the alexa
toolbar..."
"So can Alexa through crap like alexabooster.com"
"Actually this isn't true at all. Alexa is completely worthless. Here is a
thread that gives examples of small sites manipulating Alexa rankings so
that they rank higher than sites that get over 10 times the traffic:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=153286 The thread even
contains a Java script that allows you to manipulate your own Alexa ranking.
"
"Based on what I have seen - using Alexa to estimate site traffic is a worse
alternative to guessing."
"You guys that like Alexa - how can you explain that a site with around 3
million page views per month is ranked much higher than a site with well
over 30 million page views per month. This is how it is in my industry. You
are going to have a hard time convincing me that Alexa has any value at
all."
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http://forums.seochat.com/archive/t-12647
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"The secret that most newcomers to SEO love Alexa, is that because the more
you focus on it, the higher your site ranks! I fell into this trap some time
ago! I kept on visiting my site 10-20 times a day, and i was impressed! My
site jumped to the top 100,000 in no time! But now, as i realized all this
is fake, i uninstalled the toolbar, and my site is slowly drifting back to
the 1,000,000th position!!  "
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