Help me out with an Alexa Experiment?

A while back I wrote about a little experiment with Alexa, and now I'd like to extend that a bit but I need your help.

This is only for those of you not using the Alexa Toolbar. What I'd like you to do is to temporarily install that in your browser and then visit a few pages here. It doesn't matter how many - one or two is fine - the important thing is that you leave a comment here telling me when you installed the toolbar and how many pages you browsed. Then you can remove it (or leave it in if you like).

My theory is that Alexa projects statistics from a very small sampling of users and that those stats might be able to be noticeably affected by even just a very few additional people. This is just idle curiosity: I want to see if I'm right.

You can watch this yourself: the stats are at http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/aplawrence.com. Alexa stats are usually several days behind, so you have to have patience, but if there is an affect, we'd know it in a few days.

If you can beg and plead for some of your friends and family to join this experiment, that would be great too: send 'em to the Employment section or the Cartoons so they won't be totally bored, and remind them that they need to post a comment or give their info to you so you can post it..

I know, I know: major imposition just to satisfy my curiosity. Well, sheesh: I'd do it for you and you know it.. so help me out, will you? Thanks in advance..

10 comments

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Fri Jan 4 20:30:45 2008:   anonymous


Just added toolbar and browsed your site.



Fri Jan 4 20:34:14 2008:   TonyLawrence


Thanks!





Sun Jan 6 15:22:27 2008:   anonymous


Installed at 10:18AM EST 01/06/2008 and browsed 4 pages.



Sun Jan 6 15:56:55 2008:   Ken


Interesting expirement. You know, if very few people can significantly increase a sites ranking this could ruin alexa via spamming (not that I really care).

Hope you post your results.



Sun Jan 6 16:25:34 2008:   Ken


Failed to mention, I did install the toolbar and have been reading posts since.

Ken



Sun Jan 6 19:21:01 2008:   TonyLawrence


Thanks!



Sun Jan 6 22:23:46 2008:   bruceg2004


My firefox is hosed, so I need to fix it before I can try this out. I usually use OmniWeb, and have not been in firefox in a while, and it is loaded with plug-ins, that I need to uninstall..



Tue Jan 8 12:22:18 2008:   bruceg2004


Finally got my Alexa toolbar installed in Firefox.



Tue Jan 8 13:21:28 2008:   TonyLawrence


Looks like the Alexa stats have been heading up the last few days.. I'll need to go back and correlate against total visitors to see if that affected it.



Mon Apr 21 22:02:52 2008:   TonyLawrence


Alexa has apparently made some changes: http://www.alexa.com/site/company/announcement

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