I have written a couple of posts on Alexa explaining why it is not worthless (it is used as a metric by advertising companies such as Pay Per Post).
Now I thought I would add a post demonstrating why Alexa is worthless!
I was looking at some of the “Movers and Shakers” on Alexa, and saw a site “LookSearch.com” had fallen through the floor.
The site in question is an MFA site containing nothing but Ads. It has no PR.
Looking on Alexa’s wayback machine I can see it has been that way for some time, after the domain was put up for sale….
Below are their Alexa stat’s for the past 3 months:
As can be seen above, it all started with an almost vertical rise in traffic, and ended with an almost vertical fall!
Having looked at the site it is difficult to believe this traffic is genuine. 25 countries are listed in the stats, making this site very popular in almost every corner of the Globe! (apparantly!).
I would love to know how they did this, I have been told that proxies do not work too well, but clearly the people behind this site have a good method of rigging Alexa.
Whether it benefited them in any way is another matter, after all, it appears they have given up on it….
yea sometimes when i see alexa stats for a site that shoots up out of nowhere, and the site looks like crap and doesn’t navigate well, and doesn’t look like anyone maintains it, i get a little suspicious too… anyone know of another “alexa-type” site to compare traffic? i buy online advertising and it would be helpful for me
I thought after this post that maybe the Alexa rank was genuine and that they had actually used black hat techniques on search engines, which were eventually detected. I think it is probably Alexa that was rigge though…
I think there is a paid alternative you can get access to but cannot remember what that service is….
I can’t completely agree with this. Yes, Alexa has it’s flaws. However, at the same time when you monitor the whole internet, or at least make an attempt, there are bound to be problems.
I dont completely agree myself!
Most people believe Alexa is ok for high volume sites, examples like the above are the exception as opposed to the rule, I still like messing with Alexa, and there are no free alternatives….
But, alexa does not monitor the whole internet. It only monitors traffice that goes through people who use the alexa toolbar or the Firefox plugin.
Yeah, it looks weird. But I believe it has something to do with some SEO being done, maybe through gaming a social networking site.
These types of techniques produce high traffic overnight, but they are very likely useless, if you ask me.
By the way, thnx for faving me… I returned the favor
Thanks!!
Yeah thats the conclusion I wondered if they had done some SEO, but their stats seemed evenly spread across a lot of different countries, maybe Ill figure it out someday