Alexa does not work at all and we should not even recognize it as valid anymore from what I've learned.
You can game Alexa with as few as three machines running the Alexa toolbar.
So, let's see how high we can get Calacanis.com over the next five days shall we?
Step One: Everyone install the Alexa Toolbar and load my blog 100 times over the next couple of days. Please put your name below if you are taking part in the experiment. We're gonna do this for like 10 days then stop.
Step Two: Get a webpage refresher for Internet Explorer and set it to reload the page every 10 minutes or something random.
http://www.download.com/Refresher/3000-2356_4-10497539.html?tag=lst-0-2
http://www.download.com/Auto-URL-Refresher/3000-2381_4-10399160.html?tag=lst-0-1
Step Three: Load the main page (www.calacanis.com) and the about page ( http://www.calacanis.com/about/ ) so we can track the % impact we have in the details over at Alexa.
Update: Some folks have said I'm trying to do this to get my rating up/page views up. Uhhh.... no. This is a test. I don't have any ads here and these page views mean nothing to me--they are not real! They represent nothing but a test. Plus we are going to stop this test in 10 days or so--let's say Dec. 3rd. So, this is just a temporary spike in pages that does NOTHING for me on any level. Zero! If someone wants to run the test on a brand new domain name we can do that too.
Alexa is 100% wrong and you can game it with as few as three machines--or so I've been told.
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(Page 2 of 4)22. Alright Jason. Here's what I'd like to see:
http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k41/alexainternet/techcrunch_trends.jpg
The graph linked above compares techcrunch's actual visitor graph (in green) with Alexa's reach graph for techcrunch (the blue line.)
Based on that graph, it is hard to argue that Alexa is "not valid." Alexa may have its faults (just look at what they have to say about their own stats: http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more) but it certainly has its uses.
So, now let's find out if it can be gamed. Show us your visitors graph.
Posted at 3:25PM on Nov 25th 2006 by Geoff
23. Fair point Jason, But ThisNext does tack on an affiliate code, so that is where I got that from.
I also edited my post on CN to reflect your later updates.
Posted at 3:47PM on Nov 25th 2006 by Allen
24. Geez Jason, you just learned this now? No need to use multiple computers, even. People have known about this for years, see:
http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060406/3120/
25. TechCrunch.com has an Alexa rank of 605 and does just a little over 2mm pageviews per month: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s26techcrunch
That might raise an eyebrow or two.
Posted at 6:02PM on Nov 25th 2006 by Jim
26. Totally agree with the issues of Alexa, but why not mention that Om over at Gigaom wrote about the same thing, just a couple days ago? Maybe you didn't see it, sorry if that it the case, otherwise, it would be good to mention that a lot of people think Alexa is not accurate and easily manipulated.
27. Jason, Alexa says,
"multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single pageview"
And you ask,
"Get a webpage refresher for Internet Explorer and set it to reload the page every 10 minutes or something random"
According to Alexa, refreshing a page every 10 minutes doesn't seem to help. Why don't simply ask to read couple of your best posts instead? Anyway nice experiment. I will have a visit through IE with Alexa :-)
Posted at 9:36PM on Nov 25th 2006 by Gaya
28. I have not followed the steps listed above but I can vouch that it is easy to game alexa for better site ratings by merely installing the toolbar, setting your browser's homepage to the page you want to increase, and then visiting that page a few times a day during the normal stopping and starting of your browser. I did this about 18 months ago for a website I built for affiliate advertising.
Posted at 9:42PM on Nov 25th 2006 by maxconfus
29. Will you be equally outspoken if your experiment shows no results?
Posted at 2:54AM on Nov 26th 2006 by Lorne
31. I've said this before and I'll say it again:
Just by using the Alexa IE toolbar, I managed to get a NON-EXISTENT website (i.e. a random domain which wasn't even registered) to rank around 1,500,000. (It entered at around 3,000,000 and took 2 weeks to climb to 1,500,000.) That might not sound like much, but it's a higher ranking than most people's personal home pages and plenty of "serious" company websites! [And this was on my own, just visiting the domain every couple of hours.]
During the same period, my personal website jumped from a ranking of 1,800,000 to around 300,000 in just one month.
Partial repost from: http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/24539.html#id24563
(BTW, I also tried to do what you're saying with an auto-refresh but that didn't seem to work. I figured there must be something more to it - like length of time spent on the site / number of pages viewed.)
Posted at 7:52AM on Nov 26th 2006 by Tony Ruscoe
32. Jason, your rank matched gawker for a day because your reach shot up around the valleywag story and the attention it got on digg and other places. You got a lot more views from new audience and that kicked your rank up temporarily. As someone else says in the thread, Alexa discounts multiple visits from the same IP -- which might act to supress Gawker rank if their reach is static.
Why not just ask the people at Alexa why it happened? Specifically, how reach and frequency are turned into a rank.
Posted at 8:33AM on Nov 26th 2006 by Brian
33. I would never characterize Alexa's Ranking as an obsession to anyone... at least not in my opinion. I do agree that Alexa's rankings are worthless. I once installed the Alexa bar, and started working on a website I was developing. In just a couple days, the website jumped like 250K+ sites and into the top 90K. Once I uninstalled the bar, a couple days later, everything went back to normal.
Posted at 11:12AM on Nov 26th 2006 by Luis Alberto Barandiaran
34. I'm also in!
Posted at 8:50AM on Nov 27th 2006 by Shimon
35. It's not as easy as everyone says it is. Below 10K does hold some value and is not "easy" to get to by gaming the system.
http://www.yfs1.com/2006/manipulating-alexa-isnt-what-it-used-to-be.html
Posted at 11:43AM on Nov 27th 2006 by jeremy
37. Good luck with this. It looks like it's already having an impact.
I have an SEO buddy who has been loading the Alexa toolbar on computers at libraries, Best Buys, etc for just this purpose. I hope he's not upset that I spoil his master plan here.
Posted at 8:18PM on Nov 28th 2006 by Jason Coleman
38. The Alexa rankings do have some relevance to a site's traffic. I plotted some data here showing site searches vs Alexa rank:
http://blog.sli-systems.com/2006/11/alexa_vs_search_traffic.html
Although it can be gamed - it's not completely useless.
Posted at 12:52PM on Nov 29th 2006 by Shaun Ryan
39. I'm not convinced the tools you invite to install help anything about the Alexa ranking (I've first installed both, then uninstalled each one after checking how it works). However, I intend to come here every day to help you in this experiment. I have obviously an Alexa Toolbar installed (and since then, I noticed a huge increase of a site of mine Alexa ranking, even if it stills underestimated by a factor of 10 to 100 compared to other sources).
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21. Allen: I make nothing from the links on the side. Those are from ThisNext.com, a company I'm on the board of. Those links are ones I SELECTED as things that I LIKE.
I added those just to share with my friends the products and services I like (and don't like!). I make NOTHING from them.
Never assume... :-)
Posted at 2:55PM on Nov 25th 2006 by Jason