I see this line in blogs just about every day: "How to boost your Alexa Rank." They are inevitably filled with misguided musings posted by fools who can't be bothered to learn the facts before blathering about some get-rich-quick scheme.
Here's a perfect example. In this blog post, he says you can boost your rank EASILY by following his simple steps. That post was from August 9th, so he should be in the top 100 by now, right? Wrong. In fact, he barely cracked the Top 100,000. But, his rank did go up... did his scheme work? No, of course not. It is just that people who have the Alexa Toolbar noticed his post and visited his site, pushing his rank up.
Then there are the blogs that tell you to put one of our Alexa Widgets on your site. They all claim that your rank will improve dramatically. But, of course, it doesn't work. That would be ridiculous, right? But you wouldn't know that if you read these blogs.
Of course we can't forget the people who will charge you to increase your rank. I wonder how much money these services have made over the years. I can tell you with absolute certainty, that you may as well burn your money in a voodoo traffic pyre while chanting "Alexa" over and over. Maybe that will work. But these programs definitely don't and you can look at their traffic rank as proof. If that isn't enough to convince you, how about this... even trying to boost your rank through these means is resorting to fraud. That is no way to run a business. And for those wicked souls who recommend pinging, port scanning or crawling our site to boost your rank, cut it out. Hacking our site is not just a waste of time, it is a crime .
If you want to know how the rankings actually work, you can visit this page here.
So, how do you increase your Alexa Rank? Get more traffic to your site. It is that simple. Write that in your blogs. It might not get you as many readers as "Increase your Rank in 3 Easy Steps" but at least it will be true.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
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28 comments:
Hi Geofrey,
Points of clarification:
I'm a she (and I even think my photo on the right looks a bit feminine).
The post you link describes a test I ran publicly test because this is a rumored exploit.
At the end of the experiment, I reported the posting redirects to images doesn't work AT ALL. (Read Redirect images doesn't work.)
The Alexa on my low traffic blog (Big Bucks Blogger) you link is 62,713, which I think few would describe as "barely below 100,000". True, it is not near 100.
The final experiment involved very few blogs and only ran for about a week, so even if successful, I wouldn't have gotten 3 month average an Alexa below 100! (Do the math. The impact on my 3 month average would have been small, but the effect would have been clearly visible on graphs.)
That said: Alexa is an attrociously bad traffic measuring device: The alexa on my knitting blog with 10 times as much traffic is over 140,000 (and was over 500,000 before I joined PPP and had posties visiting with Alexa bars.)
I hope this clarifies a bit. :)
Hello Geofrey,
I just noticed the inlink from this post (thanks by the way). But I'm curious, did you read my blog post that you linked too?
In my blog post, I was trying to figure out ways to bring my Alexa ranking up because of a drop. Ive read, like you, the rumors that if you install the tool bar and the widget on your site, it could help. so I tried it.
The toolbar does make sense, we all know that Alexa gets their scores from users visiting your site with the toolbar installed, thats no secret.
In my blog post, this is what I said about the toolbar
"I do visit my blogs from time to time, I might as well have it installed so that I will at least get counted."
Also when I installed the widget, I only did it on one of my blogs, the other I left alone. I did see improvement but I also noted that I saw improvements in both blogs. even the one without the widget.
basically, the blog post you linked too was really an experimental look at the subject of using the toolbar and Widget to jump start your Alexa score. I never came to any conclusions, other than it may be a good idea to use it. I saw an improvement, but I clearly said I saw an improvement in both sites (only 1 had I installed the widgets etc).
Even the title of my blog post was a question. "Does the Alexa toolbar and widgets help your Alexa ranking?"
Im not going to defend or bash Alexa, we all know that it is a flawed method of rankings, how many people do you know that use the Alexa Toolbar? me...none. But I am flattered that you linked to me in your post as link bait, I'm a little guy (although taken out of context) it worked, I'm here :)
Hey I also tried the widget on your site thing, can I get a link to my blog? =P
No but really.. Calling people fools because they try to prove or disprove a myth is a bit foolish yourself..
I wouldn't call the Myth Busters on Discovery Channel fools because they try all sorts of silly things to see if it's true or not..
Hey man,
I thought I'd leave a positive comment. I'm trying to increase traffic to my blog the good old fashioned way. Stick to a niche, write solid content, and be active on other sites, etc. And guess what - it's working. Slowly but surely I'm gaining subscribers and traffic the organic and honest way. Everyone wants to find the fastest way to rank higher, but average readers won't care what your Google or Alexa rank is if your content is poor. Just my contribution to the conversation here. Thanks for the post!
Chase
alexarankteam.com does work in increasing your rank and it works well. Clients include squidoo.com, linkedin, bebo and about 35 others. Proces range from $770 month to $3500 a month but if you want your rank to be 800, its worth the price
Hi its me again, from jonespc.com. This is the thing about Alexa rankings.
We all know that it isn't perfect, many of us don't pay attn to it. I haven't for a long time, I'm not an SEO expert (which I also said in the post and other post on my blog on the subject).
Perfect example is looking at my 2 blogs. One gets more than double the traffic than the other but the lower traffic site has the better Alexa score.
What made me start to pay attn to it is when I first tried to monetize my blog beyond adsense. just about every service, whether its adbrite, or reviewme...They all use Alexa and sometimes technorati as a gauge of your websites worth.
yea its messed up, but it something that you have to deal with and pay attention to if you want to eventually monetize your site...Page rank, Alexa rank, and Technorati rank. Right now theres no getting around it.
Theres no black or white. Theres no "write good content" ~OR~ "pay attention to your rankings" its not an either/or decision. Its just smart to do both.
"Write good content while paying attention to SEO."
Whether you like it or not, a optimized site will most likely receive more "organic" traffic than a site that does everything wrong when it comes to SEO. There are some exceptions, of coarse.
As far as alexa, there isnt any hard known things you can do to raise your ranking and people talk about theories and such to try to figure out things. but they are just that, theories. Doesn't hurt to try them
@david,
First: Pay Per Post has come to the realization that Alexa just doesn't provide sort of data their advertisers need to ensure decent ROS. So, PPP will soon roll out its own in house traffic measuring system.
Second, about methods to improve Alexa rank:
There are known methods to increase an Alexa rank significantly. Because only a small fractions of surfers use the Alexa toolbar, people know that if you get a bunch of friends to the installed the toolbar and visit each others blogs everyday. Your friends don't need to stay and read-- and in fact, they can open all the blogs on a list of links using a tool bar extension called "Linky" and then close all windows. The group can boost the ranks of all participating blogs.
So basically, you do something to get traffic that is more or less worthless in any meaningful way except that it boosts Alexa.
Unless you have a heck of a lot of friends, your rank won't look like Google, but people can easily improve ranks from say 1,000, 000,000 to near or below 100,000. I discuss the method in Alexa network; cooperative exploit.
As it happens, I don't participate in a network, (My Alexa near 60,000 with only about 100 unique visitors a day is due to the fact that I often blog about Alexa! So, I tend attract Alexa traffic. Still, you can see that if 100 unique a day can get the Alexa rank down to 60,000, it just doesn't take many friends to improve your rank dramatically. )
Anyway, the "network" method is known to work provided that people don't get lazy and stop visiting each other's blogs.
I'm glad to hear that about PPP.
yea the network thing isn't quite what I was talking about. I really meant things you can do on your own.
like with search engine optimization, you can do certain things to try to help your listing with Google- effectively using keywords, making sure you use the "alt" tags with pictures...that kind of stuff.
With Alexa, there aren't things like that you can do, other than install the tool bar and make sure your own blog visits are counted (which like you said, might not make much of a difference).
The network thing, I kindof put in the same category as those link list that gets passed around from blog to blog sometimes. I don't necessarily consider those legitimate. Even though I have participated in them (I am one of the 2000 bloggers) I always think something bad will happen (since technorati had a fit with the 2000 bloggers list).
BTW Lucia, I like your blog. just subcribed to your RSS feed :)
Thanks David -- Your blogger profile goes nowhere, so I can't go check out your blog!
Agree, as far as I can tell, there is nothing you can do to single handedly raise Alexa ranks. Modify its already grossly distorted ranks in your favor requires getting involved in a team.
It would be nice if Alexa came up with a way to get even reasonably accurate results. Off by a factor of 10 on traffic estimates would be better than they are now! If they figure out how to do that, they will find fewer people trying to game them.
In China, Alexa simulating is a big business - a crime maybe and a waste of time for many, but nonetheless still a business.
Came across this post about one of the more successful hacks: http://www.6.cn.
http://forum.techweb.com.cn/thread-168246-1-1.html
In Chinese, but you can probably look at the attached image file to see some of the codes they use to try to influence Alexa.
This site is one of many in China openly known for such things.
Congrats on the recent adjustment in your algorithm though. Alexa is the talk of the town in the past couple weeks when you exposed a lot of Chinese sites trying to game Alexa.
I am just curious: if you said this kind of places does not work, why are you promoting them putting a link to them on your post? (I did not know anything about them, I actually opened them)
Thanks for that information...I wonder if I leave a comment here will that help traffic to my blog..it only started 6 weeks ago and has had about 5,000 hits which for a specialist leftist political blog is (imo) not too bad...hope some of you pop by to us. Greetings from county Kerry in beautiful Ireland
http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/
Gabriel
Alexa is one tool that can help guage the success of a website. Like Google's Page Rank, you shouldn't accept the results as gospel about how your site is doing.
Since Alexa collects traffic data from those web users who've installed the Alexa toolbar, it's not a scientific measure of a site's true traffic ranking or more importatnly industry popularity.
This also means that one shouldn't discount the tool. You should use it but also know its limitations. True SEO utilizes many tools and techniques that are examined in a wholistic manner.
Anthony
ItsTheRightWay.com
MindCenter said...
I think this is one of the better informative (and more interesting) blog posts I have read lately about improving rankings. It makes sense that a good website with good content will draw more page views and improve rankings. Thanks.
www.mindcenter.net
Vow, this is really funny. Someone actually tricked so many people using the word alexa ranking. Awesome as well as great fraud. It goes to say, more you tighten the system, more fraudsters will come and use their god given brains and amaze you. He actually got into top 100,000, just unbelievable. Wish i could do that for my site Linux Bazar at http://www.linuxbazar.com - an online retailer of books, music, movies, software, linux, projector lamps and web hosting. Still you got to give it to this guy. May be he will use his brains for positive causes in future.
This is a nice article to learn.
I'm not a SEO expert, but i just wondering about my website that getting faster with Alexa rank from millions to 27k in 1,5 month (www.avun.com). http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=avun.com
I have another domain but can't reach 200,000 in 1 year. Is there any other way to boost alexa rank?
i know there always the back door
even if you say its not true i can prove you wrong
I attempted to fownload the tool bar today all I got was a HUGE warning from McCafee lmao
hb~
Interesting post! I'm glad to finally have clarity of the myriad of 'Increase Alexa Ranking' myths floating around the blogosphere!
cyberst0rm's tech blog
The ranking in alexa shows the total traffic being generated in your website. There are various steps involved in improving ranking in alexa. First of all it is suggested to download the alexa toolbar. Then the content, which is written, should include write-ups on alexa search engine. But a low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the results can be inaccurate most of the time.
Alexa ranking is not objective at all. How many users have their tool bar?
Plat Technologies
Thanks for the information. I was wondering myself how to boost my Alexa rank for my blogs. I'm glad to see that it is quite simple - increase your traffic. While the answer is simple, the "how to do that" is not...now can you give me a post on how to increase traffic, lol?
This was a well-written report/discussion on Alexa rankings. Thanks-
Linda
LADwebdesign
Good information for the SEO people to know, thanks.
This is a good post. I have been trying to learn how to boost my ranking and have not had the greatest success. I have continuously generated new content to my blog since its creation but my score has been going up and down. I will work on generating more traffic and see what happens.
I don't understand why would anyone want to manipulate their Alexa rank at all. It is an actual indication of how many people are accessing your website. A higher Alexa Rank does not give you more search engine visibility, in fact its the other way round. So try and increase your search engine visibility and your Alexa rank will reflect how successful you have been at that.
everytime i care about alexa.. my rank increase although i don't do anything special..but... when i don't care..its drop!!
I was just wondering if it's true that google takes alexa rating into consideration.
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