Traffic Details from Alexa

Remember Alexa? It was one of the earliest add on search toolbars for web browsers and came in for a lot of criticism early on as it showed up in the alerts and logs of anti-spyware programs. It is, of course, a software spy at least in one sense of the word. It can be useful (to some users) but does indeed send back details of your browsing habits to the parent server. This is how it then provides webmasters and bloggers with the apparently all-important traffic details from Alexa.

All important, you say? Well, no not really traffic details are rather spurious and there are dozens of ways unscrupulous webmasters can game the system and boost their site’s rank. The Alexa toolbar and its equivalent addons for Firefox gained some kind of legitimacy when it was bought up several years ago by online retailer Amazon. However, the everyday web surfer is probably blissfully unaware of its existence. As such, what possible benefit can there be for having a high Alexa rank? Why do some webmasters don a gray or black hat to game the Alexa system with repeater scripts that constantly refresh their website’s pages in a browser window running the toolbar?

Well, one possible reason is that Alexa is quite unique, it is one of few ranking systems available, Google pagerank, Feedburner count, and Compete reach aside, that advertising and affiliate servers use to work out the value of a website. So, gaming Alexa and pushing your rank up as high as possible might lead to increased profits for your site. However, such activities would almost certainly be fraudulent under most legal systems, so unless you want the Feds on your tail, I’d stick to safe surfing, if I were you.