Calacanis Alexa Rank Gaming Experiment
It is well known that Alexa traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar. Simply put, the more times your website is visited by browsers loaded with Alexa toolbar, higher is your Alexa ranking. So you can easily increase your Alexa ranking by getting more Alexa toolbar powered visitors.
Jason Calacanis says that you can game Alexa with as few as three machines running the Alexa toolbar. To test this he is running a Alexa gaming experiment (external site), where he is encouraging his readers to install the Alexa Toolbar (external site), load his blog 100 times (page autorefresh tools make this easy) over next 10 days and then stop. And they will let you know the impact.
There is no doubt the Alexa ranking will increase dramatically and then will fall to lower levels once the experiment stops. But the effect will lead to a long term increase in Alexa rank because now more of his readers will have the Alexa toolbar installed and keep on polling the Alexa rank.
The current Alexa rank of the Calacanis blog at calacanis.com is 13,773 and the experiment seems to be boosting the Alexa rank today to 3,794 and that is just the beginning…
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Thats ridiculous, I didn’t know that was how Alexa figured out their numbers..
I am wondering if its this simple to game Alexa rankings, Soon it will loose all its credibility. I am surprised webmasters still want to know your Alexa rankings.
when the next is google dancing?
Alexa ranking of the mentioned blog at this moment is 41,087
View Greece Travel sites listed by Alexa Ranking at and see how fake Alexa ranking can be.
Look at alexa stats for the site listed 1st and you will see 76.2% from China!
How many travelers from China visit Greece? About 50.000 – 70.000 per year according to Greece National Tourism Organization. So how can a Travel Guide for Greece have 74.3% visitors from China?
I couldn’t even get the Alexa toolbar to work on any of my computers…I just got a big open text box in my browser.
when i started to increase my alexa rank i used the redirect from alexa to my website, and installed the alexa toolbar and would flick through the my pages a few times so alexa know that the pages are there and my alexa increased but that was about 3 months ago and i left it since then and it shot back up again
I started too. Last year I started off at 2 million and dropped to under a million in the new year. Now we’ve dropped to 4 million. Then I went to find out more about Alexa rankings and realised it was based on a toolbar, what a load of rubbish.
Alexa is pathetic, I can’t believe people still rank their sites using it, and prominent companies like text-link-ads.
Really disappointing.
Everyone knows you can game Alexa. Geez. He is a web/blog leader, why not add something that actually helps his readers? Who does gaming Alexa on his .com help? Him.