Should you inflate Alexa Ranking

[Chris1974]

I know the Alexa rating is a meaningless, unreliable number which carries no true weight. Despite this fact there are so many people who pay attention to this rating.

So my question is for a new site, should you use websites like rankraise.com or alexasurf to superficially raise (or technically lower) your Alexa rating only because there is still a large of the general public give weight to this rating?

[webprofessor]

Will it serve your business purpose ?

[etech-peter]

I don't think there's any point in inflating Alexa ranking for a new site. It's not going to help your cause. Most of the people know that these rankings can be manipulated and so they don't give any weightage to them.

[John Scott]

Alexa is bunk, but many advertisers do look at Alexa rankings. Stupid but true.

[Ferre]

I would even say that sites who have that "Alexa rating" image on it look a bit amateurish for many people, it does more harm for your 'overall image' than it does any good. The best thing is to just not show any of those things, sites who do well don't need to brag about it anyway.

[Mong]

You can raise it without much effort just visit your site couple of times with alexa toolbar you will easily get into <100K

[webprofessor]

Well.. I do think Alexa has legitimate uses, in particular for comparing different sites in the same industry.

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by Chris1974

So my question is for a new site, should you use websites like rankraise.com or alexasurf to superficially raise (or technically lower) your Alexa rating only because there is still a large of the general public give weight to this rating?

I tested the "alexa boost" programs last year and none of them had any impact on the test sites Alexa ranking.

[Chris1974]

Originally Posted by GuyFromChicago

I tested the "alexa boost" programs last year and none of them had any impact on the test sites Alexa ranking.

I'm playing around with them right now. They do work, but its very erratic. One day my ranking will be 29K Alexa and the very next day for doing the exact same thing I will have a 100k Alexa rating.

Its actually quite comical to watch everday how flawed Alexa really is. It's amazing me how a website like Abrite can rely so heavily with Alexa for its advertisers while the whole rating system is so easily manipulated and flawed.

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by Chris1974

Its actually quite comical to watch everday how flawed Alexa really is. It's amazing me how a website like Abrite can rely so heavily with Alexa for its advertisers while the whole rating system is so easily manipulated and flawed.

I've got $100 for anyone who can "fake" a site into the top 10,000 alexa rating. Here's the site:

http://www.alexatest.com

That was the site I tossed up last year when everyone was telling me how "easy" it was to manipulate Alexa. I followed every suggestion everyone proposed and the site never broke the top 100K.

IMO top 10K ratings have value. Anything above 10K is so-so.

[DarrenC]

Agreed.

I've seen my Alexa increase when I had the toolbar installed.

I think it got to as low as 84k and then I uninstalled it and its jumped back up to 150K. The results dont worry me, traffic according to them is incorrect, backlinks is miles out and it's only webmasters who use the toolbar IMO.

Darren

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by DarrenC

it's only webmasters who use the toolbar IMO.

I do think Alexa can be a bit webmaster skewed...but as long as I see sites that have sub 2,000 rankings that have zero to do with webmaster/seo type stuff I don't think it's fair to say the only people use who Alexa are webmasters. Back in the day when I was doing a ton of in home PC repair I was always surprised how many "average" PC users had Alexa installed.