How to know if someone cheats on alexa?

Is it possible to know if someone cheats on alexa?

If its not possible. How can you see how many unique ip:s (toolbars) the alexa statistics for a specific page is built on?

Your question is not very clear to me, can you explain it a bit more?

I suspect that the statistics on alexa of a specific web page either is based on a very low number of users and therefore if just a couple (for example the site owner and his friends) uses alexa toolbar the statistics will raise alot.

The other reason could be that the site owner is refreshing the page alot (aka cheating) as described on these pages

(i could not post links so lets just search for this on google)
"alexa booster"
"cheat on alexa"

So I am looking for a way to see the number of actual users /browsers that made a visit to the page. If the unique number is low I can guess that someone is cheating. But I guess that there is no way that alexa will tell how many unique visitors that they build their statistics on?

So I wonder if there may be some other way?

To be honest if they are cheating or not it is irrelevant as Alexa rankings means nothing, as they are usually very inaccurate as they are so open to manipulation as mentioned above.

To anyone who knows how alexa works it doesnt mean anything, but to the visitors (who does not know so much about alexa) it does mean something.

I think for a visitor the most important factor of a site is Content they are getting from it.
Visitor will select a site based on its content not based on its alexa ranking.

I totally agree with that, but my question is if its possible to detect if someone is cheating or not on alexa, or see the number of users that the statistics on alexa is based on for that particular site.

No, you can't tell if someone is artificially improving their Alexa rank.

Doubtful Alexa traffic ranks

Can a travel site for a small destination in Greece with only 40 links have a 57.841 rank with 19.826 1 wk Avg.?

View report

Check the share for visitors from China is 76.9% !

Seems that Chinese users visit this site like crazy! Or they have placed their site in China Internet cafes with Alexa toolbar installed? Any other ideas?
Do you know for companies that place default home pages in internet cafes in china with the alexa toolbar?

I read that from the 210.000.000 internet users in china 32% connect through internet cafes.

Any comments or ideas?
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I am after some similar answers here. I have a website far bigger then our competitor, yet their ranking on Alexa is higher. What interests me is that over Christmas one of our graph's stayed up, when theirs trailed off. This would indicate to me that staff who work on my competitors website are accessing the site with the Alexa Toolbar loaded up on their work terminals; hence the reason why their graph went down over Christmas and ours did not. (Traffic generally does go low over Christmas, however their graph hit the floor - where they should be because they are a smaller site.)

I would too be interested if there is any tool from Alexa that can state how many unique IP's / Alexa toolbars have accessed a site. I really do feel that our competitor is cheating Alexa and I want to stay whiter than white with our site stats. My competitor is telling it's customers that they are a bigger site, because their Alexa page rank is higher... Who can I contact in Australia to investigate? This is bordering on fraud!

There's no tool to access that information and I agree with others that Compete and Hitwise are far more important but still unimportant for many types of businesses. If you are running an Adsense program or something similar I can understand the concern over Alexa but for many businesses it has no meaning. Many large corporations prohibit the installation of such toolbars and if that is your target audience they'll never see the data anyway.

It's a shame because my competitor is actually publishing Alexa results on their website and on their info that they hand to their clients. They also verbally say that they are the bigger site. We are by far bigger on Hitwise, (Hitwise kindly confirm that.) It would be good to be able to tip someone off at Alexa so that they can jolt their figures to reflect the truth. Surely it is in Alexa's interest to be accurate? Otherwise why on earth do they bother? I mean no one in this forum seems to rate Alexa - so how on earth do they get taken seriously, and by who...?