One of the things that I monitor on a regular basis is the Alexa What’s Hot (on the web), formerly called the Alexa Hot URLs. In order to be on that list (that’s updated every five minutes or so), the site has to have a LOT of traffic going to it. So, when I looked at the list of top 20 URLs on the web in terms of traffic, I was surprised to see two new gTLD domain names there on the list. While I’m surprised that this is the first time I’ve seen new gTLD domains there, I’m not surprised that they are .CLUB domains.
The two sites are DatingAdvices.Club and HomeFitnessBeauty.Club. Unfortunately, looking at these particular names, though, it appears that they’re most likely on the list of Alexa What’s Hot URLs because they’re doing something nefarious with the traffic or doing something that isn’t “natural”.
One of the sites, HomeFitnessBeauty.Club is banned in Google, which makes me believe that it’s “fake” traffic that is causing Alexa What’s Hot to show this site on the list:
The other site, DatingAdvices.Club, is not banned in Google, but only has about 20 pages indexed. I really want to give these two sites that benefit of the doubt that the traffic is natural, but personally I know that the Alexa Hot URLs list is easily manipulated. Essentially there is one particular URL (a redirect) that Alexa is monitoring. That’s the URL that their toolbar pings whenever someone with the toolbar installed goes to a website. If one were to send lots of fake traffic of “bot” traffic to that URL, Alexa would think that the site is receiving traffic and visitors–but it’s not. It’s just fake traffic.
So, that’s why we just cannot trust the Alexa rankings. In fact, I will go further and say that if someone points to their Alexa ranking or even talks about Alexa rankings, I would question them, as the Alexa rankings can be manipulated so easily. And here is a perfect example, with these two .Club websites.
