Alexa !! I doubt any blogger will be unaware of this, and all of them would like to get to the top of the ranking as early as possible. Before I tell you why I hate Alexa , let me tell you something more about Alexa :
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on the web traffic to other websites.
Now the reasons :
1. Its unable to update thumbnail image of my webblog !!
Update: Seems like technorati has taken the responsibility of updating the blog thumbnails.
I use technorati and technorati being the top blog search engine, I would like to keep it updated to the very moment I commit any change. I am not a designer to design my own theme and stick with it . Since the time I changed my theme, my blog thumbnail has not been updated at Technorati.
I tried searching the support forum and got the information that its based on Alexa. Everytime I submit my blog url at alexa, I get the same information that the web thumbnail will be updated in 48 hours. Gosh !!! 48 hours , Community sites like mybloglog , spicypage and thumbnail generator site like snapr are able to update the blog thumbnail in seconds , then why cant a web information giant like “ALEXA” !! Moreover even after submitting my site nearly 5 to 10 times, my thumbnail is not yet updated. Is this is the quality of web spiders of Alexa ??
2. High alexa rank means High Traffic !! I am still doubtful
Alexa rank is not based on the number of visitors , but based on the number of visitors with Alexa toolbar installed
Whats the difference ??Well suppose my blog gets 1000 visitors per day who dont have alexa toolbar installed , than another blog who get 100 visitors per day with alexa toolbar installed; it is quite likely that rank of another blog will be higher than mine. Alexa gets its results and “rankings” by measuring the traffic of its users. Not all web users are equal in terms of surfing skills, surfing experience, demographics, psychographics, interests, etc. And that means that Alexa is not looking at a random sample. Moreover since , Alexa toolbar tracks your visit to the webpages and transfers the information to Alexa its even considered as a SPYWARE ( a non malicious spyware ) :-D. Traffic is mainly built on returning readers, hence if your blog content is not upto the mark , it will mainly increase bounce rate for your site,hence decreasing the page views.
3. Redirect my blog url !! Then what about google ??
Another option to increase my alexa ranking , as per some blog posts , I can use url redirection provided by alexa . That means suppose your blog url is “www.example.com” , it will change to
“http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.example.com/” . Well it may change your alexa ranking, but then what about Google as Google doesn’t read the redirect. So if you use “alexa re-direct” everywhere , it will affect your PR at google because no direct links are being picked up by google.
4. Its easy to manipulate
However , I would be the last one to try something like this. Loren Baker has written an article about how to manipulate alexa rank. Quoting the article this in one of the several ways mentioned to do so :
1) install the Alexa toolbar into your browser.
2) Create a special webpage that contains a JavaScript array of webpage addresses from your site. Then create a JavaScript function that loops through the array and opens each address into a separate browser window (make sure they all use the same window). Between cycles through the function, cause the function to “sleep” using the “timer()” function for a random interval of time between say 5 and 45 seconds. Make sure that when the function reaches the end of the array of addresses it loops back to the beginning.
3) Periodically set the script to action in your browser with the Alexa toolbar installed and let it churn away overnight. To save bandwidth you can always disable the loading of images. If you want it to be really effective, have a few friends run the same script from their browsers with the Alexa toolbar installed.
That is all there is to it. I did this about a half dozen times to one of my sites over a period of one month and it jumped up to the 80,000 mark in Alexa. I’m sure if I ran it more often it would have done even better.
How much you can rely on a ranking which is so easy to manipulate.
Can you even imagine there are people who are monetizing this. If you are good at manipulating alexa rank ,
You can charge from $1000 to $5000 to a company to bring there Alexa rank to top 50,000 by selling the idea at Script lance
Inspite of all these points , I would love to be in atleast top 25000 to 50000 in Alexa ranking 
.Comments welcome !!
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[...] 4 reasons why i dont like alexa I use technorati and technorati being the top blog search engine, I would like to keep it updated to the very moment I commit any change. I am not a designer to design my own theme and stick with it . Since the time I changed my theme, … [...]
i also tried to change the thumbnail of my blog ..but it says 48 hours and the thumbnail is not changed even after 7 days .Alexa is crap but still advertisers love it ..so we don’t have much choice left.
@shashank, yeah !! you are right, we dont have much choice. I wish alexa could have worked somewhat like google.
I don’t see why People bother with Alexa ? just keep working on your content and connect to people. Unless you are selling text-link-ads. I only use it to check the popularity of a blog.
@arpit, the answer is in your question !! The reason is that people judge some blogs based on alexa ( not talking about you ). Moreover, my main reason was the first reason i pointed, blog thumbnail. We take so much pain in changing theme , colors etc finally to realize someone who boast as web information company , is not even able to update it.
Finally lots of people ask me , how to change alexa ranking, and thats where i felt, is it really important ??
If you want to get the best thumbnail service why don’t you use the girafa thumbnail/thumbshot service (http://www.girafa.com ) ? They have a great service and a great support team, which will help you with any matter that you will have.
Thanks for the link, will surely check it out.
Well, as someone who does occasionally buy advertising, I certainly wouldn’t rely on Alexa to determine what the value of my ad should be. Alexa is good for an estimate of popularity, but I think it only has a degree of accuracy when you’re in the very top percentage of websites.
It’s something no smart marketer should rely on, except perhaps for campaigns being run on the top websites.
yeah !! you are right
..its only accurate when you are in top 100k
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A low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on http://www.google.co.in, http://www.search.yahoo.com and http://www.search.msn.com search engines.