A new Alexa experiment

Having experienced bizarre and inconsistent results regarding Alexa rank of my sites, I decided to read up on how Alexa computes rank.

It's not only based on unique user visits to a site, but on the number of page views, as well. That puts a whole new slant on things.

What if I was to visit all of the pages on all of my sites every day? Would this affect the Alexa rank? Let's give it a try.

As all of my sites have a Google sitemap file listing all the pages on the site, it should be easy to write a script that takes my browser to all of those pages.
I should be able to make it linger on those pages for good measure to make it look as if it's a human reader and not a robot.

The experiment will be all the more interesting because some of my sites have considerably more pages than others. In theory, the ones with more pages should gain a higher Alexa rank more quickly than those with fewer pages.

I'll keep you posted...

Short-lived

Well my faith in Alexa was very short-lived.
Today I checked the ranks of my sites as usual, and all except one had reverted back to the same rank as two days ago.
I then revisited the one which hadn't changed, and then that reverted back to the old rank also.

What's more, the numbers I get from the Alexa Toolbar never seem to bear any relation to the numbers I get on the Alexa.com site, where my sites appear to have a considerably higher rank.

Maybe I'll just dismiss Alexa as being a waste of time and concentrate on Google.