In my previous post I introduced and discussed the importance of the website traffic monitor AlexaRank. Whether you value your Alexa traffic ranking or not there are definite advantages to having a high AlexRank. Many webmasters and business folk look at the AlexaRank as a reasonable representation of a site’s traffic. If you are selling advertising from your site the more “proof” you can demonstrate of your traffic – and in AlexaRank’s case it is an independent valuation of your traffic, which adds credibility – the more likely advertisers will come knocking at your door willing to give you some of their ad budget.
Make More Money From Text Links
It’s well known that many text link brokers, such as Text-Link-Ads.com (aff), factor in AlexaRank when determining the price to charge advertisers for links on your site or blog. The higher you raise your AlexaRank the more you potentially can earn, and this reason alone is enough to pay attention to methods to increase your AlexaRank.
An AlexaRank Experiment
AlexaRank is calculated using the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa takes the browsing data from the millions of people using the Toolbar and calculates the traffic ranking of each site. As Alexa states, while low traffic sites are harder to gauge accurately, once a site reaches a 100,000 or less ranking the accuracy of the measure increases. Hence if you can top a 10,000 AlexaRank, or even 1000, the credibility of that ranking is increased.
As Blaine Moore pointed out in a comment made to my previous AlexaRank article, it is easy to – as he put it – “game” the AlexaRank if you have a tool that checks AlexaRank installed on your computer, and that doesn’t have to be just the toolbar, it can be for a FireFox extension like SearchStatus, which I recently installed on my browser. These tools send data to Alexa, and when Alexa receives any data about your surfing habits it will raise the traffic rankings for the sites you provide data for – and if you visit your own sites often you can raise your ranking.
I can’t verify that installing any AlexaRank checking tool will help your own site’s AlexaRank and to be honest after I installed SearchStatus I did not notice any significant change in my AlexaRank at my blogs. It wasn’t until I conducted a different experiment that I noticed more verifiable proof of a technique to increase your site’s AlexaRank.
How I Increased My AlexaRank By More Than 25%
Here’s how my logic went – I figured the toolbar and other AlexaRank checking tools tell Alexa my browsing habits, which is fine, but I’m only one person visiting my blogs (albeit I do it many times each day). What I really want is a way to tell Alexa about every person who visits my blogs, not just me. In order to do this, the Alexa reporting tool needs to be on my blog and downloaded by every person who visits my site each time they visit.
The obvious answer was to install an Alexa Site Widget on each of my blogs. The widget looks like this:
If you click it you will be taken to my current Alexa traffic ranking data. You can also find the live widget in the sidebar of all my blogs.
After installing this widget on to my blogs, within the next few days my rankings increased at least 25%. This blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, was sitting around the 19,000 AlexaRank mark and within seven days had dropped to just above 15,000 as I type this. Prior to this gain my AlexaRank increases had been slow and steady, but never as significant as this in a short period of time, unless of course I earned a traffic spike from some other site(s) linking to me.
I noticed similar results at SmallBusinessBranding.com and the BlogTrafficSchool.com Blog too, which makes me almost 100% certain that installing the Alexa site widget will increase your AlexaRank.
This makes complete sense, as my thinking above explains. If every visitor to your blog downloads the Alexa site widget when they visit your site, then Alexa has data on every visitor you have, at least every web reader, I don’t think RSS readers count since they never download the widget unless they go to your site. You might call this “gaming” your AlexaRank, but in this case I don’t think that’s an apt description – installing the site widget in fact helps to give Alexa enough data to provide your true AlexaRank, as opposed to what it thinks it should be based on the data it has from it’s toolbar users.
If you sell advertising from your blog or website then you should care about your AlexaRank. If that is the case then installing the Alexa site widget is a must. It takes only a few seconds and could significantly improve your current AlexaRank.
Click here to get instructions on installing the Alexa site widget.
If any other bloggers or webmasters out there notice an increase in their AlexaRank after following my instructions and installing a site widget I’d love to hear about it. While I’m confident my results at three different blogs is good enough proof, it doesn’t hurt to have more examples to back up the hypothesis. Please leave a comment and tell me how your AlexaRank improves.
Yaro Starak
AlexaRank Chaser
I don’t quite get this. Is this post suggesting tomislead advertisers about the amount of traffic you get to your site?
I think I’m missing something here, but I’m not sure what it is.
I have been experimenting with Alexa rankings for about 4 months. When I started my rank was at 24,000,000. I installed the toolbar and over a week was able to bring my number down to 23,000,000 +. I then put the banner on my site and did not notice any significant decrease. After a month went by, I encouraged friends, family and those who regularly visit the site to install the toolbar. Went from around 23,000,000 to 700,000 in no time. I am conducting 2 other experiments and will post the results from those if they prove to be of value. Click my name above if you want to read the current conclusion and exactly what steps I have take so far. That page will be updated as we continue to experiment with ways to improve rankings. My understanding is, once you get down in the 100,000 range, it becomes very difficult to get lower and maintain.
Awesome post, exactly what I was trying to find out. My Alexa ranking doesn’t even come close to matchup what my Cpanel stats say. I should be at least in the top 500,000 if not higher, so I’m going to give this a go.
the alexa ranking does not increase the number of visitors to your site so … it’s meaningless …
My site is 1 month old when i install alexa widget and it ranks 36,000,000. After a month later, it drops to 1,900,000. What an increase in my rank.
Higher alexa rank will boost your credibility in the web. This will give big impact to advertiser not for surfer.
Thanks this will solve one of my problems with textlinkads, I got rejected due to a bad alexa rank
Now I will have to mess with the Pagerank
Thanks for the info, Yaro.
I already read about this tip.
The only thing is that I put the Alexa widget inside a post about traffic.
Now I will put it in the homepage, and I will check results.
Let’s see.
Don’t agree with you on this, till date i haven’t added any alexa widget on my blog and easily entered into 100K landmark, but after reading this post i’m going to give it a try only.
See if it works for me or not
There are many ways to increase Alexa ranking. Increasing traffic with valuable content, link building and building a community are the best ways. We have a large group of China suppliers that visit regularly, helping to boost our Alexa Rank.
Yaro, I wouldn’t want to do something silly just so that my Alexa rank could go up when in actual fact my site don’t really get more people to it. But heck! My site only scored in the region at 850,000 because I got 53 people to my site for that particular day.
I have been above the top 1 Million ever since and had given out over $100 through different ventures to get my blog out there in the top 100,000.
Guess I will really need to follow your advice now – and it’s FREE – how ignorant can one be?!
Yeah….I have witnessed miraculous changes after adapting this phenomenon. Thanks for sharing this storming article
I have a site http://www.viveonline.com that just has coming soon page added. I was going to see if my stats on alexa change at all with completely no traffic. I have a feeling if I add the widget my traffic rank will go up. That doesn’t say much for Alexa’s credibility.
Hi,
nice piece of information. but will the installing of alexa widget on my blog not dampen the ease with which my site loads ?
Yes, Installing Alexa Toolbar really works like charm!
Thanks for the share. I installed the toolbar and will keep u posted on the progress!
THanks
Just get webmaster traffic and the ranking will become better and better.
Great tips. I use the Alexa toolbar and I monitor my websites alexa rankings daily. Amazingly, it goes way up and comes way down. And sometimes I rank better in countries like Japan than I do in the U.S. for a little while. It depends on where the majority of your traffic comes from.
Thanks for the info I will download the toolbar!
thanx for the wonderful post, i heard that writing reviews of top ranked site on alexa page also increases the ranking, at the same time, i didnt found much difference in ranking after installing widget, but one thing i would like to share is, whenever my blog gets high traffic the website ranking jumps higher and when traffic decreases the rank goes down, here i beleive alexa is totally based on visitor count for judging alexa rank for any website.
I use the toolbar, but don’t have the widget on any of my sites. I tried the widget out a long time ago. Didn’t really like it, because it slowed my loading page speed down.
If target SEO related niches and that seems to work for me. Most Internet marketers and people into SEO, seem to use the Alexa toolbar. It is a metric and also used as credentials. However, it still can be manipulated to a degree.
In my time as a blogger and innovative Internet Entrepreneur I have found a number of different ways to do things. Now for those of you who don’t know what an Alexa ranking is, an Alexa ranking is a global ranking system which keeps track of all the top websites in the world. For instance Google has an Alexa ranking of, yes you guess it, 1. Facebook has an alexa rank of 2 and YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 3. The highest I have been able to get one of my websites on the Alexa ranking system is around 70,000 globally and that’s another thing. Alexa has both, global and local ranks which you can rank for.
Based on my research I think alexa rank is based solely on your domain search result on google.com.
Check your website on google search and take a note how many items come up under your domain. Go to alexa and check what is your rank.
Redo the step in 48 hours and see if your search result stay the same I bet your rank will stay the same.
The only way to increase your traffic?
1. Buy ads on Facebook, Google, Yahoo Bing
2. Spread the words around to everyone you know about your website
3. Type your domain often on the google/yahoo/bing search engine
4. Update your website with something that very useful to people
5. Be nice to everyone on the internet (*lol)
Good luck!
Thanks for all the information. I am new at this and your blog has been very helpful!
My Alexa rank just jumped up 10,000 ranks and I don’t know why?? I moved up in the Google Rank but moved down in Alexa…..
since when?
good info, I’ll try it out.
Although this blog post is more than four years old, many of the tips remain the same. Frankly, I don’t view Alexa as a particularly important metric, but I guess for those folks who are in the top 100, it’s good bragging rights.
Alexa is important to ranking. I always install on my browsers and I notice an increase if I am browsing my website regularly.
I might give this a try. It can’t be that bad I guess. And if it helping your overall ranking then that is a bonus I guess. Thanks for the tips.
I never knew that only the visits by the people who have installed alexa toolbar will be counted for alexa ranking. Anyhow thanx a lot man. Il install the widget rite after posting this
This certainly works. I have used this technique on several sites.
i heard lot about alexa toolbar so i decided to install alexa toolbar let us see whats the result….
Works, thanks alot
In my opinion Alexa ranking is not accurate I have seen many sites have lower ranking than 500k even thought they have more than 5k daily
Good man Yaro, Will stick it up on my site and report back the results. fingers x’ed
Hi Yaro,
Awesome post. I added the Alexa widget to several of my sites. I hope it works. BTW, thanks for the Blog Profits Blueprint. I will implement it. Thanks for your good blog. Keep up the good work.
Hi, Yaro!
First of all, congrats on your great work! I’m reading your book (BPB) and am enjoying it to the fullest!
I have installed the Alexa site widget on my blog 3 days ago and my position only gets worse. By the way, my traffic gets better every day (the natural search is abt 3 times higher than a month ago) and my rank was reduced by 1 million positions in the last 10 days (1,5 million in the last month). Do you know what could be the possible reason for it?
Thanks and regards,
Erica
http://www.oamorestanarede.com.br
(from Brazil)
Thanks for the helpful post Yaro, my site is about 8 months old. I was looking for how to boost my site’s alexa rank, and landed here. Will be implementing your tips shortly, wish me luck!
great info, I will try, a few moments ago my alexa ranking of about 300 thousand, now to be 3 million. I am very disappointed about this
Great info, I will try your methods, thank you!
Really interesting! Just got a new site launched, and have installed alexa search and searchstatus, now adding the widget too. Only thing is that the widget is pretty ugly! Wondering if it’s ok to customise it or if that would stop it working? thanks for the great tip!
HI,
I want to increase the alexa rank of my blog. I hope this post will help me.
Thanks to share such a nice post.
Hi,
I don’t see there is any connection between alexa ranking and website traffic. Will it increase my website traffic ? or this is only for advertisers ?
Thanks
The Alexa Traffic Ranking is a system that measures web traffic and awards an Alexa Traffic Rank. However, for web traffic to qualify for the Alexa Ranking, the website visitor must have the Alexa Toolbar installed in his or her browser. As for the ranking, a low rank (ex: 1) is a good thing and means higher traffic levels.
Nice article. What happens if you have a 25 %rise -alexa ranking wise but drop from lets say page one 6th place to the 9 or 10th…
My website has no Alexa Rankings at all, I have a good amount of traffic though..I think I will give it a try and install Alexa’s Toolbar on my blog’s widget.
Thanks,
Alexa rank does not reliably show the statistics, their statistics are based on the toolbars. When I had about 100 visits a day, Alexa Rank was 110K. When my website (www.unavitaverde.net) got to 900 visits per day and there was improved depth of page views, Alexa rating has deteriorated to 400K. It’s brad…
Wow, this is crazy. I think this has added to my confusion as to how accurate Alexa’s ranking really is. I will experiment on one of my lower ranking sites and see if it really works.
These simple Alexa strategies are easy to implement and will make a huge difference in your Alexa ranking. Ultimately you want visitors to do more than visit your home page, you want them to interact with your site. Be sure to optimize your home page for SEO purposes, ease of use, and interaction. Creating a positive user experience will get visitors to return again and again.
thanks for the tip hope it works i have been strigling for over 4 years to get better alexa ranking, thanks for sharing
Well, its worth a shot.
I searched for this because I noticed that the main site that is beating me has an alexa ranking in the 200s whereas mine is in the millions although I have tons of quality content, a long time internet presence, and hundreds of visitors per day. its really annoying! Can Alexa ranking help me beat this low quality competitor? I really need to figure out what they are doing.