A quick follow up to our previous discussion about using Alexa to measure how many people visit your site (or visit your competitors): Alexa is reporting “geek” sites doubled in popularity overnight. Jason Striegel hypothesizes that this is likely the result of digg users downloading the Alexa toolbar en masse on the day that a top story linked to Alexa.

That means that most sites could probably rig the stats by encouraging their readers to download the Alexa toolbar, or, as I hypothesized, the Alexa toolbar is not a good measure of readership across the entire internet whole, but of people who install whatever they’re offered (mostly internet neophytes).

Zillow, Trulia and RainCityGuide don’t seem to have been affected by the geek onslaught.  I think that many Digg readers (myself excluded) might be too young for real estate websites, no matter how geeky they may be.