Everybody in the know used to smile when someone bragged about their site’s Alexa rank - well of course that’s very good, it’s just that Alexa rank is fairly meaningless.

But that all changed, when paid blogging brokers started using Alexa in their scoring algorithm - the better the rank, the higher the payment.

It’s an imperfect index, we know that, they know that - but what else are they going to use? So the possibility of manipulating Alexa rank for monetary gain opened wide…

Some will still claim that there’s no proof Alexa rank can be manipulated - not so. You only have to live in a non-North American country and have universal content popular with non-alexa bar users - 85% of your traffic is from your very own country? I don’t think so…

Using the standard methods - install the Alexa toolbar for IE, or the Searchstatus plugin for Firefox and visit often (and the same for your friends) - you can get it to around the 40-50,000 level. Below that, you are getting over the 1,000 visitors per day level (reckoned in ‘true’ traffic) and it does get harder.

Then you’ll be employing third parties to do the surfing for you - one does occasionally see a site with PR1 and Alexa rank of 18,000.

Like a lot of ‘manipulation’, is it worth it? You could just use the standard principles, content, links, research your market etc and that way you’d be improving Alexa, PageRank, networking etc all at the same time. It’s so boring being good.