Something's been bothering me about what some webmasters are doing with Alexa.com. They are either using, buying, or creating programs that "boost" Alexa rankings. One of the sites that I myself use to check out website popularity is Alexa.com. Obviously any tampering there causes a bit of frustration for me. Why? Because it's stupid.

Basically what these Alexa boosters do is send thousands of fake hits to your website, fooling Alexa into thinking that your website is vastly more popular than it really is. The result? Your Alexa ranking goes up. Anything else? Nope, nothing. Zip. Fooling Alexa does not fool search engines, does not fool people, and has absolutely no effect on traffic to your website.

So, why do people do this? I'm guessing about a third of them do this for fun. Another third probably think that they're actually boosting their website's real-world popularity. Finally, the last third is probably doing it to fool advertisers to buy advertisments on their websites. That's right. I know of more than a few advertisement companies (such as buysellads.com) that present Alexa.com data to their customers as one of the deciding factors in what websites they want to buy ad space from. Not to mention all of the individuals and companies out there checking Alexa for rankings before they decide to purchase ad space.

So, the only thing you're doing is wasting time. Yours, and others. And in some cases, you're wasting money. Other people's money. So stop. Please? :)