The first page of SHOWCASEpage.net, one of the few we monitor, was written last November 11 and as one would expect, the first page was actually only an “About” page.

The only activity the site had so far was to play around with a few WordPress themes using a plugin called “Theme Test Drive” and experimented with WordPress plugins like Snazzy Archives and Syndication for prospective clients.

SHOWCASEpage.net activated the Syndication plugin to grab RSS feeds from other sites (including this site) which was later deactivated and also the resulting articles were “unpublished” from the site.

Today, we noted that this site has an Alexa ranking of 12,126,403 (see screenshot). Yes, only after 2 months and a few pages most of which were RSS feeds. Shouldn’t we be happy that this site achieved that ranking in only a short a time and with hardly any activity?

We don’t think so. We have other experimental sites which have not come close to this ranking. And some of the sites have been online for a while.

So what’s wrong with Alexa? Or, what’s wrong with the other sites we have been monitoring too?

We don’t know yet. We have read somewhere that the Alexa system is flawed. But without having a complete picture of how Alexa does its maths, we cannot comment on those statements.

But the situation we have at the SHOWCASEpage.net website certainly requires a closer look.

Is there really something in this site that is attracting traffic? We don’t know yet. We will install additional metrices in our pages and find out what’s causing this abnormality and see if the Alexa ratingsystem is giving us reliable measurement.

Updated 25 September 2009: SHOWCASEpage.net has an Alexa traffic rank of 1,980, 477 and we have a couple of articles written at our blog at WordPress.com with references to Alexa’s Help pages posted in July 2009 where Alexa acknowledged that Alexa’s traffic rankings beyond 100,000 are not statistically meaningful.