Amazon.com's Alexa and Google's Page Rank

Alexa.com
How many people are familiar with Alexa.com 'The Web Information Company'? Even more interesting is the fact that it is an Amazon.com company.

Alexa gathers web traffic stats through users who have installed it's proprietary Alexa Tool Bar. A site's rank or score is measured on a scale from around 4 million as the lowest, to 1 as the highest. That's right, the lower the score, the better. There is a graph or chart that shows traffic only for those sites who have reached 100,000 or better.

A not-so-innocent and difficult manipulation of both Page Rank and Alexa is to visit your targeted site from various web enabled devices (computers, phones, etc.), with unique IP addresses.

I should explain by saying that both PR and Alexa register a hit or vote from a particular IP address only about once a day. So you cannot sit at the same
computer (which generally keeps the same IP address for a day or so) and just hit refresh all day long and expect to raise your scores.

I have, in the past, made mad dashes to public library computers, computer stores with display computers that are on the internet, friend's houses who are on the web, business customers of mine and used web enabled phones, etc. just to pull up my site and get another unique hit. Yes I was obsessed but I did manage to get one site to the 100,000 mark on Alexa. It will forever show in Alex's archived stats that I made this "achievement".
I also raised my Google Page Rank up to a 6 for a couple of sites. It was a good learning experience but I do not recommend trying it yourself.

Google PR
Google has a proprietary method of ranking all websites. Supposedly if you have a high enough rank you can use your clout to do stuff like sell advertising space on your site. I say it doesn't hurt to have this.

Your Google rank is partly determined by who links TO you, not who you link to. Also, I have seen higher page ranks on my websites that mention Google or have a Google search box.