The general belief is that website ranking systems do not provide results for malicious domains and other strange URLs, but sometimes such websites manage to gain popularity and receive a score from these services.
A team of researchers from Cyveillance conducted an experiment to see if Alexa would rank domains involved in phishing attacks. After comparing the numbers, they found that the probability of a domain ranking on Alexa that results in a phishing attack with a score between 0 and 100,000 is 0.2%.
A rough translation of the percentage means that almost none of the websites ranked by Alexa with a score of up to 100,000 are involved in phishing attacks.
According to Cyveillance, a set of 2000 randomly selected URLs were used for the experiment, which were collected over a one-year period, from September 2013 to September 2014. Of these, 493 were popular enough to receive a score from Alexa.
The information gathered from the research shows that if a website has a good Alexa then it is less likely to pose a threat to phishing attacks, but there are still exceptions.
