It’s something i have come accross frequently, but now more and more people are doing it! Buying a domain name because the alexa ranking looks good.

A lot of people think a website/domain name with a strong alexa ranking looks good, yes it does but it just looks pretty on the eyes. A lot of people fake their traffic stats using various programs on the market, i will not give the names to these programs as i will just be influencing people.

These programs load a proxy list or a list of working i.p’s, they send fake hits from these i.p’s to the website you input. This in turn boosts your alexa ranking. You need to be carefull when purchasing a domain name, especially if the price is high. Theres two methods/ways to find out if the traffic is fake and if someone is trying to burn you.

Method Number One: If the alexa ranking is very low, do some queries on search engines, you wont believe how many domain names that are for sale on the web have an alexa less than 100k but have 0 incoming links, and 0 indexed pages!

Method Number Two If the person will not provide accurate screenshots of the traffic from Google or Awstats. Ask them where the traffic comes from, and say you want proof. If they cannot provide you with this information, ask them what keywords on search engines they rank high for. That will catch them out, if they provide some keywords do some research on google and other search engines they do provide tools that allow you to check how many people search for certain keywords a month. If that does not add up, then do not buy the domain/website.

A lot of people would normally stay away from sellers that fail to provide accurate screenshots and information regarding the traffic, but i’m afraid innocent people that are new in the webmaster world are often mislead.

Before i end this post, i would also like to add that Alexa favour webmaster websites, so if you own a webmaster related website, your ranking will be lower than it should be. I have seen webmaster websites recieving 500 unique visitors a day, with not that many page views ranking less than 60k.

I hope this information was usefull, keep your money safe! Do not buy if something smells fishy.