Alexa and Google PR sitting in a tree.
Ask me if I give an S-H-I-T.

No… I don’t. Alexa is just as useless as Google PageRank. The numbers don’t mean much of anything considering:

• The average person doesn’t have the Alexa Toolbar installed which measures page popularity by pages loaded when using the toolbar.
• For this reason, it’s used by webmasters.
• It’s pretty easy to artificially inflate your statistics if you want to.

Why would you want to? Well, for people buying and selling links and or full sites, Alexa has become one of the default indicators of a website’s success. Not rightfully so in my opinion, but whatever. In fact, I’m sure people have full business models built around buying a domain, artificially inflating stats such as Alexa, Google PR, unique visits, etc… and sell them to goofballs who evaluate the success of a site solely on these principles.

I was talking to Tyler Cruz yesterday and without request he offered up a link showing the Alexa stats for one of his websites. I replied something like, “Whoopdy Doo… Alexa is pointless.”

To this, he quipped back: “It’s only pointless for people who have pitiful Alexa rankings. Like anything above 100,000. Like you. LULZ, hax, pwnd, noob, eh?” Whoa, whoa, whoa there buddy. Alright I made up the last sentence in that quote. But seriously, I don’t even have the Alexa Toolbar installed. I don’t really care. I never really did. Until now.

So now I’m running a little test to show that yes, I can get some pretty good Alexa rankings by installing the toolbar and then using some additional measures to “game” the system. And after my alexa ratings improve, I still won’t give a flying fu… funny… I won’t care (keeping it PG-13).

So here is what I’m going to do and I invite you to run the same test yourselves. Either on your own sites or if you’re feeling motivated… on eurekadiary.com as well.

1. Download and install the Alexa Toolbar for FireFox
2. Download and install the ReloadEvery plugin for FireFox
3. (mystery step that I’m researching now)
4. Either in the background, or when I’m AFK, load up EurekaDiary.com and have the page auto-refresh every XX seconds. This should make Alexa think lots of people are looking at my site… yippy!

Now I’m not sure how big the impact will be but I’m sure it will have an impact. Time will tell. At of the time of this post here are my Alexa statistics:

• Alexa.com Rank: 449,118
• Alexa Toolbar Rank: 368,589
• Pageviews/User (3mo.): 1.7
• 52.9% of visitors are from the Netherlands
• 31.4% of vistors are from the United States
• Then UK, Australia and Germany
• My traffic rank in the Netherlands is 11,888

Thanks Netherlanders… you all kick butt… all 12,000 of you who actually have an Alexa Toolbar installed!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be monitoring these Alexa stats for fun, just to see what happens with this little test. I’ll let you know how it goes but feel free to install the toolbar and follow along yourself!