Alexa Retiring?

[donnie]

This is undoubtedly because of all the fake bot traffic out there. Over the last 6 months or so, its totally screwed up Alexa, gooogle analytics, yandex, semrush and other sites and there's no way for them to filter it out

Basically people are buying thousands of hits from fake traffic sites like https://www.sparktraffic.com/ or https://traffic-creator.com/. Its not real traffic but the bots have got very clever and now look and act just like real users. They dont just hit your page anymore. They can google your site, click on your links and they even have the Alexa tooolbar enabled so as far as alexa is concerned, its legitimate traffic to your site and your ranking goes sky high

Even google analytics cant tell the difference anymore. So for example, people can buy a few thousand bot hits to their site and configure the bot to stay on your site for a minute or two and then click a few links on your page and voila ..... your bounce rate drops drastically and your session time goes up through the roof

This is really screwing up the industry. You cant trust traffic trades anymore cos a lot of them just send you bot traffic in return for your legit traffic. ( I have a list of sites that trade bot traffic if anybody is interested, just pm me). You cant even buy traffic anymore because its invariably bot traffic you get

I always used to support alexa but its totally meaningless now with all this fake traffic. And they arent the only ones suffering, i dare say google will have to re-think some of their algorithms to try and filter this out

The way its going, in a few months time half the "porn surfing" traffic will be fake !!

My Alexa rankings have been unusual year.

Why are people paying for fake hits, that is a waste of money.

I used to care about the Alexa rank until this Summer when I realized what it said and what trades could send did not make sense any more.

[tacnet]

This is undoubtedly because of all the fake bot traffic out there. Over the last 6 months or so, its totally screwed up Alexa, gooogle analytics, yandex, semrush and other sites and there's no way for them to filter it out

Basically people are buying thousands of hits from fake traffic sites like https://www.sparktraffic.com/ or https://traffic-creator.com/. Its not real traffic but the bots have got very clever and now look and act just like real users. They dont just hit your page anymore. They can google your site, click on your links and they even have the Alexa tooolbar enabled so as far as alexa is concerned, its legitimate traffic to your site and your ranking goes sky high

Even google analytics cant tell the difference anymore. So for example, people can buy a few thousand bot hits to their site and configure the bot to stay on your site for a minute or two and then click a few links on your page and voila ..... your bounce rate drops drastically and your session time goes up through the roof

This is really screwing up the industry. You cant trust traffic trades anymore cos a lot of them just send you bot traffic in return for your legit traffic. ( I have a list of sites that trade bot traffic if anybody is interested, just pm me). You cant even buy traffic anymore because its invariably bot traffic you get

I always used to support alexa but its totally meaningless now with all this fake traffic. And they arent the only ones suffering, i dare say google will have to re-think some of their algorithms to try and filter this out

The way its going, in a few months time half the "porn surfing" traffic will be fake !!

Why are people paying for fake hits, that is a waste of money.

Not if you think about it. Imagine if you paid a bot to do 10,000 google searches for a particular keyword, find your site in the results and click on your link (yes thats easy for a bot these days). Google is going to think your site is really popular for that keyword and boost your rankings

Then for a few extra bucks you can have the bot with the alexa toolbar installed. Thats gonna boost your alexa rankings aswell

Then if youve got traffic trades going on you can pay for the bot to click on your outgoing links too. Thats gonna make your trades think you are pushing out a lot more traffic so they will send more back in return

The traffic is indistinguishable from real human traffic and its making a real mess of our industry. I dont know what the answer is but I am seeing more and more sites doing this now.

Alexa has obviously given up (and im sure more will follow) and google is going to have to do something because its making their rankings meaningless.

[TheButcher]

This is undoubtedly because of all the fake bot traffic out there. Over the last 6 months or so, its totally screwed up Alexa, gooogle analytics, yandex, semrush and other sites and there's no way for them to filter it out

Basically people are buying thousands of hits from fake traffic sites like https://www.sparktraffic.com/ or https://traffic-creator.com/. Its not real traffic but the bots have got very clever and now look and act just like real users. They dont just hit your page anymore. They can google your site, click on your links and they even have the Alexa tooolbar enabled so as far as alexa is concerned, its legitimate traffic to your site and your ranking goes sky high

Even google analytics cant tell the difference anymore. So for example, people can buy a few thousand bot hits to their site and configure the bot to stay on your site for a minute or two and then click a few links on your page and voila ..... your bounce rate drops drastically and your session time goes up through the roof

This is really screwing up the industry. You cant trust traffic trades anymore cos a lot of them just send you bot traffic in return for your legit traffic. ( I have a list of sites that trade bot traffic if anybody is interested, just pm me). You cant even buy traffic anymore because its invariably bot traffic you get

I always used to support alexa but its totally meaningless now with all this fake traffic. And they arent the only ones suffering, i dare say google will have to re-think some of their algorithms to try and filter this out

The way its going, in a few months time half the "porn surfing" traffic will be fake !!

Why are people paying for fake hits, that is a waste of money.

Not if you think about it. Imagine if you paid a bot to do 10,000 google searches for a particular keyword, find your site in the results and click on your link (yes thats easy for a bot these days). Google is going to think your site is really popular for that keyword and boost your rankings

Then for a few extra bucks you can have the bot with the alexa toolbar installed. Thats gonna boost your alexa rankings aswell

Then if youve got traffic trades going on you can pay for the bot to click on your outgoing links too. Thats gonna make your trades think you are pushing out a lot more traffic so they will send more back in return

The traffic is indistinguishable from real human traffic and its making a real mess of our industry. I dont know what the answer is but I am seeing more and more sites doing this now.

Alexa has obviously given up (and im sure more will follow) and google is going to have to do something because its making their rankings meaningless.

Reminds me of 1997 and circle jerk sites some were good at bot traffic
And imagine in those times when people like XPICS were paying 25 cents a unique click, you could have made millions of dollars a week with this stuff.

[pokerking]

As usual a few people ruin it for all, no other way to say it.

[TheButcher]

This is undoubtedly because of all the fake bot traffic out there. Over the last 6 months or so, its totally screwed up Alexa, gooogle analytics, yandex, semrush and other sites and there's no way for them to filter it out

Basically people are buying thousands of hits from fake traffic sites like https://www.sparktraffic.com/ or https://traffic-creator.com/. Its not real traffic but the bots have got very clever and now look and act just like real users. They dont just hit your page anymore. They can google your site, click on your links and they even have the Alexa tooolbar enabled so as far as alexa is concerned, its legitimate traffic to your site and your ranking goes sky high

I was thinking about what you said and it makes sense. For the latter part of this year I have noticed 1 or 2 new registrations here where the email addresses are all weird looking (first sign of a bot)

For example 2j6d3gs43gsfsd at some email or other.

They would register and immediately add an avatar image and signature link to some site. The way I have run this place for ever is no one can post real time until I check and approve their fist post. I learned this issue after the first couple of months back in 2004, when bots and spammers would signup and spam.

Until a few months ago it was not a problem having people register add an avatar and sig, but I started noticing these bots would add a sig link and not post, just to get the sig indexed I guess, so I changed it in November. They can not add any profile information, avatar or signature until the first post is approved. I get the odd complaint from a new member why they can not add a sig when they register and I tell them it is for this reason, plus when they do add a signature it is retroactive to the first post they made so no harm done.

[Emil]

Their day has come and I will not care to see them go.

[jag]

As usual a few people ruin it for all, no other way to say it.

This is always the way things happen in life. Sad but very true.

[tacnet]

As usual a few people ruin it for all, no other way to say it.

Yep. These bots are screwing up everything

In the last few months Ive deleted around 30 or so traffic trades because they were sending 95% bot traffic. They were almost impossible to spot. They all had great alexa rankings and looked like they were sending us a truck load of traffic. It was only when another webmaster gave me the heads up that I realised and deleted them. Now Im struggling to find legit traffic trades to replace them

Nowadays bots can even read captcha images. For years we have been using our own captcha images with no problems. Then in the last few months we kept getting our contact form submitted 2 or 3 times a day with spam. Turns out the bots were able to read the images !!!

It seems to be the last few months things have got really bad and they are just getting worse

[gotonudecom]

How long have I been telling you Alexa is a piece of shit?!?!?


Too many people have to learn the hard way?

[tacnet]

How long have I been telling you Alexa is a piece of shit?!?!?


Too many people have to learn the hard way?

Its only become useless in the last 6 months or so. Since the proliferation of all this bot traffic

You used to be able to filter out bot traffic by checking if the user had javascript enabled as bots never used to have that. But now they have become so clever they not only have javascript enabled, they also have the Alexa toolbar enabled

Added to that Amazon are obviously going to use alexa.com for their echo devices and thats worth a lot more to them than a free ranking site

[jag]

Added to that Amazon are obviously going to use alexa.com for their echo devices and thats worth a lot more to them than a free ranking site

You make a very good point and this might be the whole reason behind their decision.

[killah]

Just change the domain if they want to sell or use Alexa.com for another site, that should not be so hard.

[shoopa]

I wish Google would do the same close up so I an get some rest

[gspotman]

When it went to a paid service I knew this was the beginning of the end.

[DeSexGuide]

If Alexa wanted the domain why did they wait so long,they should have bought it years ago, but who knows.