Perhaps the truth. I did not check my alexa rank until I was applying blog reviews at reviewme. When I checked, it was saying some 2,148,879.I did not expect that. Fairly I get around 100 unique visitors a day. I was not surprised to find that almost 1,000,000 sites ranked above my site were a fraud and they were not near to get around 50 unique visitors.

The reason is simple.

Alexa is not giving due importance to sites ranked above 100,000. They just calculate it on the basis of visitors to that site who have alexa toolbar installed.

Alexa toolbar uses an ActiveX control which is not supported by Firefox. Its I think only supported by IE.

Only 50 % of current Net population use IE. Out of those I think around 10% -5% might have installed the Alexa toolbar{Or even low!}. Your site may hardly get a visitor with Alexa toolbar installed. So how would you get a low rank?

Now Webmasters are taking the advantage of it. They just install the toolbar or ask their friend/network and visit their own site daily. This results in a fair increase of their rankings

I tried it myself .My ranking increased from around 2,148,879 to 1,515,890 in just two days for about 5 pageloads of my site.

The picture above says that If I continue to visit my site like that, I'll get a rank of around 70,000{or even less ? :-)}

So you can increase your traffic rankings simply by visiting your own site and having the toolbar installed or ask your friend to do so. And interestingly this now has become a booming business. I saw a site which promised my Alexa traffic rank around 100,000 if I pay them 500$.I’m surely not going to do that.

I don’t think after this system has been discovered Alexa rankings should be given importance for ranking a site.