I have nothing personal against Alexa (or any other company for that matter). The theory behind the ranking service they perform is great. But the problem with Alexa, and most every other user-driven community/project/site, is that it is flawed. Much like Digg.com, end users can easily influence the “outcome” of the service. The difference between Alexa and Digg is that nobody talks about how easy it is to skew Alexa rankings.
I personally conducted an experiment on Alexa back in 2002. The goal? To see if a handful of people running the Alexa Toolbar could sway the traffic ranking of a website.
At the time, my hardware review site OCIA.net was only a couple years old and traffic was still “less than desirable”. I had been keeping tabs on the site’s Alexa ranking for a couple of months when I decided to go forward with this project. I asked about 5-6 staff members and friends to install the Alexa Toolbar on their primary computer.
I selected them because they are the people that I know hit OCIA.net the most. I also installed the Toolbar and it wasn’t long before the changes started to become visible. Below is a screenshot of the Daily Reach.
Interesting indeed. It becomes even more clear when we take a look at Alexa’s Traffic Rank.
According to the Traffic Rank, we were within the top 15,000 or so sites… all by having a few staff members and friends install the Toolbar. The huge dropoff near the end of 2004 is when we all stopped using the Toolbar.
If you were to look at these findings alone, it would appear the site has taken a nose dive in traffic the past few years. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Fact is, the site is getting probably 5x more traffic now that it was back in 2003.
So why am I even bothering to talk about this? Because more and more people are looking at Alexa Rankings for all different sorts of things. For me personally, when requesting review samples from companies, I have had several ask for the site’s Alexa Ranking. Many companies won’t even consider you if you don’t meet a certain Ranking requirement. I have explained my experiment several times; some completely understand, others I never hear back from.
I never anticipated Alexa would get as “big” as it is today. Just remember the next time you ask someone for their Traffic Ranking or someone asks for yours, looks can be deceiving.
P.S. - Please DIGG! 
