Alexa and Amazon are now hand-in-hand and I have noticed a rapid rise since getting involved with both(over 220,000 pts in the past week alone - now in the top 1.5% of the 16.6 million web sites out there). Coincidence?

Offering a free search engine service for Sellers and Buyers and a ultimately free lead plan for participating RE Investors has also been good for building traffic and membership.

hth



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~neodemes~
Neodemesne: Your Real Estate Portal
Where Sellers, Buyers and Real Estate Investors Come Together!

Alexa rankings are meaningless now as many sites use screensavers that keep reloading their page every minute 24 hours a day to artificially raise their rank. You can even join services that will have a whole bunch of other people doing that for you.

Someone started a rumour that having a good Alexa ranking was good for search engine rankings ( it is not!) so now everyone and his dog are trying all sorts of tricks to raise their Alexa rankings.

You are not doing that are you? Your page counter does not jive with your supposed Alexa ranking.

Excuse me if I end up sounding indignant, I'll try not to but:
1. I don't engage in unethical or devious practices of ANY kind. I succeed or fail through honest, applied effort.
2. Until you mentioned it, I have not heard anything about Alexa being meaningless.
3. Refreshing pages, automatic or otherwise, shouldn't affect anything...they can tell if the 'hits' are unique or not.
4. The ranking is based on increase in user traffic, not a one-one ratio of hits to Alexa points, if that is what you are implying. I have succeeded in a short period of time to increase traffic from unknown to driving targeted, meaningful traffic to the site.

Sheeesh...why so quick to minimize someone's success?

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~neodemes~
Neodemesne: Your Real Estate Portal
Where Sellers, Buyers and Real Estate Investors Come Together!

Sorry to offend, I was merely commenting that your page counter shows only 886 page views since January 19th - and that does not jive with your increase in Alexa ranking - and your web counter IS working correctly.

So, your "visitors" are either not going to the main page of your site - or they are reloading the page repeatedly in their browser, which is loading the page from cache and not registering the "visit". The Alexa Toolbar would register the "visit" though.

By the way,I am telling you this because it happened to me.... someone unknown listed one of my websites with one of these screensavers. Over a period of a few months I saw the Alexa rank skyrocket - I felt pretty good until I saw the log file and realized all the extra hits were coming from one site! I disallowed the offender via .htaccess and now no longer have the problem.

Anytime you see your Alexa ranking go up dramatically I would suggest you monitor your log files - it probably is not real traffic.

Ah. The main page is actually a new main page, relative to the rest of the site... That counter will actually increment itself with every refresh....which I guess is neither here nor there.

I don't know a whole lot about the underlying dynamics of Alexa or how they gauge activity...I would think they would be more sophisticated than to not count unique hits..but I don't know...maybe it is no more than hype to promote alexa itself...but I do know I am getting new visitors, new membership registrations...and I will continue to find it all very exciting as I watch the Alexa number change for the better...whatever it all means.

Update: 3/6/04 now ranked 95,604

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~neodemes~
Neodemesne: Your Real Estate Portal
Where Sellers, Buyers and Real Estate Investors Come Together!

[This message has been edited by neodemes (edited 03-05-2004).]