Sohu (Nasdaq: SOHU) CEO Charles Zhang said on September 4 denied that Sohu manipulated its site traffic ranking on Alexa.com, reports eNet. Zhang said that he is willing to swear to Chairman Mao or to the heaven that Sohu did not cheat on its traffic statistics. Alexa on August 31 made changes to its traffic calculations, resetting traffic counters to zero for several Chinese websites that were discovered to be manipulating site traffic. Sohu’s global traffic ranking dropped from the teens to number 48 while its global-page-view rate decreased from 1.7 to 0.83 percent on September 3.

Simply Amazing! Not only is it well known how far off Alexa’s ranks tend to be relative to other reports, but using Alexa in China to measure site stats is simply a sign of ignorance. Alexa just calculates its stats using the toolbar few of us have. While it might give some accurate approximation in Europe, who said anything about China? With all the money Google has got behind it, how easy is it for G to spread its toolbar (not!) - and here we are talking about amazon, which is virtually inexistent in China.