Alexa toolbar rankings and the BNP, I wondered when this would come

Comment on General Election 2010 Poll Results by David.

Alexa toolbar rankings and the BNP, I wondered when this would come up.

I’m a Search Engine Optimisation Consultant, (I get sites ranked high in Google) I own over 100 domains and as a person who webmasters regularly come to for advice I know a LOT about Alexa rankings.

Alexa rankings are very easily manipulated, a single person can get a domain into the top 100,000 Alexa website ranking easily (it’s child’s play).

Even when there is no manipulation the results don’t mean much. Two of my domains, one which regularly breaks 10,000 visitors a day and the other rarely breaks 1,000 visitors a day.

Guess which one has an Alexa ranking of around 75,000 and which one over 200,000.

10K visitors = 200,000
<1K visitors = 75,000Doesn't make a great deal of sense until you understand how Alexa works.There's an Alexa toolbar which is installed on browsers like Internet Explorer, FireFox etc... and when a person with the toolbar installed visits a website it registers on Alexa as a visitor.Only a tiny percentage of visitors will install the toolbar, so it doesn't give a true picture of visitor numbers. If 1 in 1,000 people have installed the toolbar and your site just so happens to get 3 Alexa toolbar users a day it looks like it's getting 3,000 visitors a day, when it might be getting as few as 3 visitors.With my example above the users of the site with 10K visitors are not heavy Alexa toolbar users whilst the below 1K site must have a far higher proportion of Alexa toolbar users.I know people who make a good living manipulating Alexa rankings. When an advertiser considers buying ad space on a site they'll look at Alexa rankings to determine if it's a popular site, higher the ranking (closer to one) the more they will pay.I would not be surprised if a core group of BNP supporters are running the Alexa toolbar to boost the Alexa ranking. The BNP are very good at online promotion and that's what I'd advise them to do if they were one of my clients and it was important to them (which it is).Take Alexa rankings with a BIG pinch of salt.I see this comment going down well :-)David