Boosting your Alexa Ranking without using IE
April 23, 2007 | Comments (14) | Filed under: Ranking
Of all the traffic indicators and aggregators out there for your site, Alexa has to be the one I’ve had the most issues with. Not only is Alexa biased, but it’s also held in high regard with many online resources making it impossible to simply ignore. Probably my biggest problem with it is the traditional way in which it compiles traffic. In order for your new site to even register on Alexa’s radar, visitors of your site need to both be using Internet Explorer and also have the Alexa Toolbar installed.
This is a big problem in two major ways. First, with every passing day, Firefox gains in marketshare. The last time I looked, Firefox and other non-IE browsers were accounting for just under 35% of all Internet traffic. If your site is visited by web savvy users, like this one is, you can expect that number to be even higher. For example, Bookmark Bliss is visited by more than 71% Firefox users. While Firefox addons are starting to pop up that help track statistics in the browser, very few users even know about them, let alone install them.
Secondly, users must have the Alexa toolbar installed, in order to improve your ranking with their visits. So, even if your visitors are using IE, what are the odds they’ve taken the time to install Alexa? Most likely slim to none, especially with the fact that many spyware and adware removal tools are starting to flag it as problematic.
These two reasons combined can make it very difficult for sites to rank well in Alexa without really taking off as a top end blog. Even Alexa themselves have admitted to these problems and the bias.
Recently, Mark from PotentMark.com alerted me to a post over at Entrepreneurs Journey entitled how to boost your Alexa ranking in one easy step. The author goes through several of the issues with Alexa and eventually introduces a widget you can install on any site to help improve your ranking. Since Alexa rank for this site is very poor (roughly at the 103K mark right now) I thought I would give it a try and see just how well it works.
In terms of organic Alexa ranking, our site hasn’t experienced much of a change at all since going live. If we see any significant movement, it will most definitely be attributed to the widget (which is now installed near the bottom of the black toolbar). I’ll be monitoring our ranking closely, and I’ll let everyone know just how big of an effect the widget has made, if any at all.
For any of you out there who are in a similar situation as us, new site with very little IE traffic, what steps have you taken to improve your Alexa rank? If only Google would release a traffic ranking for Analytics, then we’d all be in business and Alexa would become extinct.
It never hurts to hope 
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Craig Raw’s SearchStatus extension for Firefox not only reports the Alexa and Toolbar PR numbers for a page, but also reports back to Alexa just like the Alexa toolbar does.
I’ll be very interested to see how that works for you. Since my blogs are personal, I haven’t put too much effort into working on my rankings. And since Alexa is such a pain, I try to pay as little attention to it as possible!
But, I looked at my stats and I last month, 65% of my traffic was from Firefox. IE accounted for less than 25%. Wowsers.
Oh, and just to clarify, too. I’m definitely not a fan of gaming Alexa. I know that’s not what you’re advocating, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t come across as someone who was.
Shane — but isn’t that a problem for the people who don’t have the extension installed?
I like the idea of the widget on the blog because my users don’t have to do anything extra.
Yes, you’re right. I totally misread the point of this post. I got into my mind early that he had a problem with there not being an Alexa component for Firefox and that skewed everything else
I’m not sold on there being enough value in the Alexa rank to add another widget to my site, though — particularly one as big as that that I can’t style. Of course, if Chris ends up having raging success with it, that may change my mind
Wow! I had no idea Alexa was so lame at how it calculates its rating. I know of Alexa but didn’t bother to look too closely at it because I just assumed my blogs wouldn’t even register this early in the game. I can’t image that something IE centric which requires a toolbar extension could become so powerful. Clearly, there is an opportunity for something else to bump it off its throne.
That’s a great point, Bret. If you’re Microsoft, why not make anonymous tracking part an integral part of IE? It’s not like they haven’t weathered privacy storms before, and IE still controls the vast lion’s share of the market. Hitwise just got bought for $240M, and this data would be far more accurate.
(And no, I’m not stalking the comments
You gotta love the “subscribe to comments” plugin.)
I just didn’t think you had anything else to do, Shane
And yes, subscribe to comments is a must for any blog!
I don’t know why Google doesn’t release a more comprehensive ranking tool. They have PageRank, but if you combined the stats from their search, analytics, and sitemaps you would probably have a pretty accurate representation of site traffic. Much more accurate than Alexa for sure.
I’m not too sure if this widget will pan out or not. I’ll give it a few weeks and see. I personally hate it, its ugly and takes a little time to load.
Some sites really take Alexa ranking as a powerful traffic indicator. For example, Text-Link-Ads uses it as a way to sort sites in their repository. The better your Alexa rank, the better your placement…
great tip, I think my blog can use this little widget to boost my alexa ranking
We have released AlexaAutoSurf.com - an auto-surf site that only allows users with the Alexa toolbar to join/surf. Take a look at it, most of the sites in the network have already jumped from 7-8 million all the way close to 100,000. It’s a great way to receive thousands of hits daily and you’ll see the results on Alexa!