[TheCDAllenGroup]

Originally Posted by akula

put a security certificate on the site
...have a look at paypal.com or any other encrypted website - they don't have alexa or compete rankings

Requiring a login or no?

Like wellsfargo.com? A publically-viewable site, but secure?

[TheCDAllenGroup]

So...the solution to prevent these 3rd party tools like Alexa, Google, Compete.com would be to have a security certificate placed on the website [encrypting the site], like Akula mentioned?

Do I have that right?

[TheCDAllenGroup]

Ok,

I finally found the answer to prevent Alexa, Google, and their 'ilk' from crawling a website:

Alexa Web Search - Webmasters Help
The Web Robots Pages

[DuValEnterprises]

what'd you end up finding CD? was the solution a security certificate or what?

did you just put up nofollow tags to prevent crawling?

[TheCDAllenGroup]

Originally Posted by DuValEnterprises

what'd you end up finding CD? was the solution a security certificate or what?

did you just put up nofollow tags to prevent crawling?

Actually, it was basically composing and uploading a robots.txt file at the root directory of the website. Prevents 'crawling' [and thusly gathering of information] from Alexa, Google, etc.

[pentupentropy]

These traffic ranking websites also work on code placed within the pages of the site by site owners. This lends to the legitimacy of the larger sites. Sedo.com - domain reselling - has pretty good traffic stats for their domains listed and websites. Alexa is not inefficient, in fact it's just the opposite. They may have minor flaws in their system but they're entirely advanced and ahead of the competitors which is why you know their name and not other traffic stats sites who deal with less-than-enterprise level businesses.

What you had originally asked was if you could verify the traffic a place gets. Although I have no experience with adbrite.com, you may want to recommend that the site you are thinking of advertising on create an account with a larger ad company (ad brite is getting quite large these days, 100' of millions of ads served a day, possibly over a billion). If someone has an Alexa traffic rank, you can guestimate that they're traffic is a little higher than what you see on the alexa rankings because of the nature of how that system works and the fact that tracking every possible visitor is hard work given that not everyone has a static IP which is a huge part of the traffic verification system and database-stored info that is kept to calculate these things.