Can the Alexa be tricked?

[grnidone]

I was looking at the Alexa 'movers and shakers' page [alexa.com] and noticed a site that moved up 1000% in the Alexa rankings.

How could that be possible without a little help from clickbots?

[edit_g]

I worked with a company once where when they found out about Alexa they installed it on all their office pc's - the office pc's already had the company homepage as the start page. A large amount of "heavy work-surfers" opening new windows constantly and the difference in ranking was VERY obvious within a month...

[woop01]

Just asking your users to install the toolbar will create that kind of a jump in the rankings. Some of my sites are A LOT higher than they should be because I included a brief commentary on Alexa in a newsletter.

I wasn't trying to openly cheat the system, I just felt my users would like it. The jump was something in the range of going from 500,000 to 10,000 in three months without much of a change in overall traffic.