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People love a good rank. I know I often check my traffic rankings and web stats and as much as I tell people it’s not so important; I just can’t help myself.

One way of checking a websites traffic is by using Alexa, which bases it’s rankings on people who have visited a website - if they have the Alexa toolbar loaded.

Compete is another such system that allows you to be nosy; looking at other website’s rankings or comparing your website traffic with a competitors.

I still check my Alexa ranking regularly, and I won’t stop, but I also know it’s very vague and below the top 50k, I’d suggest it is easy to manipulate.

For instance, I launched a private project a couple of weeks ago - www.pervolia.org - a community website for a village in Cyprus. It went live on 29th February and already has an Alexa ranking for the week of 399,014 - all from 59 visits (Google Analytics) - and I am pretty sure, I have driven that ranking because I am using the CMS.

I used to have this conversation with Adam about his website which attracts A LOT of traffic. He would get a bit irrate when he knew he was getting tens of thousands of visitors a week, and The Escape site would still be higher on 100 per day. BTW, his site has since eclipsed ours.

MTV reported that even the Pros get it wrong after Comscore gave their verdict on Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” online release last year:

The band’s statement also dismissed the results of a recent report issued by comScore, a company that measures online consumer activity. The comScore report suggested that 60 percent of fans who downloaded In Rainbows — which the band offered as a “name-your-own-price” product beginning October 10 — paid nothing for the tracks.

In the statement, Radiohead said the comScore data was “wholly inaccurate” and that it “in no way reflected definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”