An Alexa Experiment

I am not sure what I think of Alexa after this short experiment. Alexa is a way to rank websites, the higher ranking, or the lower your number is, the more credible your website is. Well, credible might not be the right word. But the lower your number is, the more popular your website is... that sounds more like it. The sites with the lowest numbers, the top sites according to Alexa, are sites like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft . So, what I did a while ago was to let all my traffic from traffic exchanges go to my blog. This way I would get a lot more traffic each day and it might seem like I had a more popular website than I actually have. In a few weeks my traffic ranking at Alexa went down about 100,000 and it kept on climging on the ladder of the popular sites at Alexa, until I stopped sending traffic from the traffic exchanges. Now, my rankings are back to normal again. If it´s this easy to get a pretty good ranking at Alexa, how credible is this ranking system really? I would think that you can´t get below 100,000 at Alexa just by sending thousands of hits from traffic exchanges, but still. If you can get below 300,000 by doing this, many might think you have a pretty popular site when all you do is click all through the night :-)