There’s been quite a bit of discussion on Code4Gold Forums regarding Alexa Rankings and how they are generated, what purpose do Alexa rankings serve, is Alexa spyware, and can Alexa Rankings be faked.

To begin with, in 1997 Alexa.com released a browser toolbar application to help internet users quickly navigate site’s most commonly used. In 1997 IE toolbar plugins were the “in” thing. I was personally working as a C++ developer for a company developing a “newsbar” IE toolbar for paid subscribers. Of course, back in 1997, the concept of tracking toolbar usage, especially in the case I was working on was a commonplace. Using the information collected from toolbar users, Alexa developed a system where they started ranking websites based on information they were archiving. It was an ambitious goal to map the web based on toolbar users surfing patterns and create a search engine with a ranking system. While Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, etc were mapping the web by spidering pages, Alexa was learning based on it’s members surfing habits.

How it Works
Alexa Toolbar, when installed in IE or a similar browser uses “window messages” to intercept each request for a new page from the host browser. Any C++ programmer with a minor knowledge of how to program for IE knows that to accomplish what Alexa does is run a threaded app that listens for calls to the windows message handler for the browsers navigate message, intercept the url and send a message to Alexa’s servers about the url that was requested. Your browser doesn’t even know the difference and takes you happily off to the page you requested. Heck, Alexa even encrypts and compresses the packet into a couple of DWORDS before they send it. What I like is that when the toolbar sends off it’s packet it doesn’t wait for a tcp confirmation, meaning it could never tie up your browser if Alexa’s servers were down or slow.

Is it Safe?
I’ve been using the Alexa toolbar and the Firefox plugin since version 1.0 back in 1997. As a developer myself, I can attest to the fact Alexa (owned by Amazon), has offered developers the keys (for free) to a wealth of data and information in hopes that developers will find new ways to present the data to the public in creative and unique ways. There’s been much controversy in regards to Alexa toolbar being classified as spyware or scumware, but if you realize, your IP address is in every server’s logfiles for every site you visit, and many new Cisco routers that are designed to prevent DDOS attacks actually log data coming in and out of their networks. With all that technology in place, I’m really not worried if Alexa sees the sites I’m surfing, and I do think their rankings are fairly accurate so I’ll personally continue to use it.

Can You Fake Alexa Rankings?
You can certainly lower your rankings into the 1 million range just by having the Alexa toolbar installed and surfing your own pages a few times a day. To break into the top 100,000 could be easily accomplished in a small office or by having a lot of friends install Alexa toolbar and surf your page. Once a site has been in the top 100,000 for their 3 month rating, you can pretty much figure a lot of people outside of any “click team” are really accessing the site. When a site dips under 10,000 over a 3 month period, they are definitely receiving a huge amounts of traffic, and there’s no way to fake that kind of ranking.

Overall, I personally like the Alexa system and will continue to use the toolbar, actually, the Firefox plugin called SearchStatus, which is available here…

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

SearchStatus is a neat little FireFox plugin that lets you see the Google Pagerank as well as the Alexa Ranking of every site you visit and is a must for any serious webmaster, blog publisher or anybody interested in Google PR or Alexa Ranking.