Alexa rating between 4000 and 4500, but no traffic.

Just bought this domain, and traffic is totally not what it seemed.

[FrankWeb]

Just recently I bought a domain through pool. I was hoping to be the lucky one. Well I won the domain and the alexa ranking says, around 4.350

Even today alexa shows a ranking of around that same figure.
I checked the stats, of alexa and it shows the domain is doing great for more then a couple of months.

Now I see like a hand full of visitors..I can really count them on one hand.

Anybody, who has a clue on what might be the case?

[Yidaki]

>the alexa ranking says, around 4.350
>Now I see like a hand full of visitors
>Anybody, who has a clue on what might be the case?

Maybe the previous owner stopped visiting his domain with his Alexa toolbar after selling the domain. IMHO, alexa traffic rank is useless and doesn't say _anything_ about the value or the _real_ traffic of a domain.

[ByronM]

Could have been someone who purchased expired domain traffic or simply forwarded all of the traffic to the domains being sold to get high rankings..

and now that it is sold they're off to doing the same for other domains.

OR it could be that link checkers, bots & spiders noticed downtime, cheats, change of whois and dropped the pages from serps until it finds content back on there and gets re-submitted.

unfortunately you will probably never find out unless you ask the person you bought it from :)

[FrankWeb]

Thanks all for your reply.

Well the domain was expired when I bought it so was already offline for some time.

Funny thing is that the rankings are still even improving today. I guess those rankings are of no use.

Is there any other tool or site on the web that does the same thing as alexa?

[jeremy goodrich]

>>Is there any other tool or site on the web that does the same thing as alexa?

Nah, Alexa is unique in that unless you want to pony up some serious $$$ to pay ComScore or JupiterMedia for reach statistics.

[neo_brown]

From what I have noticed Alexa's results are certainly not realtime. I have seen many times when my site has suffered a set back in the search engines Alexa will still show it as being on the up and once it has recovered Alexa then shows it in decline.

[cyberair]

"Is there any other tool or site on the web that does the same thing as alexa?"

I find that metricsmarket used together with alexa can help to show if the alexa rank is inflated or real.

[FrankWeb]

Thanks Cyberair, I never heard of Metricsmarket.

Curious as I was, I checked this one.

Results is: "Estimated 1,158,900 visitor sessions in the last 30 days."

I wish.... true story is 10 visits a day.

Meanwhile DataGuy, did some better research for me (thanks again) and it seemed that the previous owner pointed some domains to the one in question.

Just for everybody to remember, be carefull when buying a domain, with what looks like a good ranking.
I learned my lesson, too bad it cost me some money.