Internet Rankings are Massively Gamed → Washingtons Blog
Internet Rankings are Massively Gamed - Washingtons Blog

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Internet Rankings are Massively Gamed

Alexa is the most popular free website ranking service. It has been described as "a Nielson rating for the popularity of the website you are visiting."

With a higher Alexa rank, more people will be attracted to reading your website (on the theory that if its a popular site, it must be good), and advertisers will be more interested in paying to run ads on your site.

Those in the know have realized for some time that Alexa isn't perfectly accurate.

But it turns out that many people are also intentionally gaming the Alexa rankings.

How?

Well, Alexa supposedly ranks the popularity of websites by how many people with Alexa the toolbar installed on their computer surf to a particular site.

Many techies have figured out tricks for increasing Alexa ranking.

More amusingly, people all over the world will happily surf to your site manually - or using automatic scripts - to make it look like you have more readers than you really do.

For example, the folks at Alexa Rank Team provide the following informative price list:

If you want your site ranks within 500, we will make your site's ranking listed within 500 everyday. And after 3 months, your site will be ranked within 500.

What is the price?

Alexa Rank(daily) Price
60,000-100,000 $488 per month
50,000 $499 per month
40,000 $550 per month
30,000 $555 per month
20,000 $600 per month
10,000 $700 per month
8,000 $720 per month
7,000 $750 per month
6,000 $780 per month
5,000 $800 per month
4,000 $960 per month
3,000 $1,100 per month
2,000 $1,650 per month
1,000 $2,000 per month
900 $2,500 per month
800 $3,000 per month
700 $3,500 per month
600 $4,000 per month
500 $5,000 per month
400 $5,500 per month
300 $6,000 per month
200 $7,000 per month
100 $14,000 per month
And the folks at Alexa Rank Team provide a very logical explanation for why they don't let their own website get ranked by Alexa:

Q: Why not ranking your own site?

A: We do not want to be tracked by ALEXA , which will bring risks to our clients

If you can't afford even the lowest-price services of the Rank Team, no problem ... UpMyRank has something for free:

Webmasters, raise your Alexa Ranking and start enjoying free traffic instantly! We will send up to 1,000 visitors to your website everyday, just for participating in the UpMyRank TrafficExchange Program...

Best of all you can leave the AutoSurf program on all night and all day and earn credits while you sleep!

I'm not trying to pick on these 2 companies. In fact, there are more than 29,000 websites devoted to "auto surfing" programs which will increase your Alexa ranking.

Unlike the governmental propaganda wars which are apparently being fought on the Internet, everything I've run across so far indicates that this is just a commercially-driven turf war for advertising revenue and a wider audience.

1 comment:

  1. I knew the world can be a bad place at times, but I never knew there were so many scam artists until I surfed the web. Research a simple question on pulling weeds and you can expect a dozen tricks to get you to buy a legitimate product that has no relevance whatsoever to said task.

    For any ad placing small business out there, think of what you'd need and want as a reliable reference first. It's a bit of time and work, but it's something you have to do yourself.

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