Improving your Alexa Rank without Using IE - 1 Week Update
May 1, 2007 | Comments (9) | Filed under: Ranking
Last week, I talked about a potential way to increase your Alexa ranking without having to install the Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. This method basically calls for the use of an Alexa Widget (the ugly gray box at the bottom of the black sidebar) that reports traffic from your site back to Alexa. If you’re a regular reader here, you already know how much I dislike Alexa but its ranking system is used by many as a measuring stick for how popular a site is. So, it’s difficult to just ignore it.
Well, even if it is in the running for the worst looking widget ever made, it appears the Alexa widget actually does help improve your Alexa ranking. In the just over one week its been installed, I’ve already seen our ranking jump almost 20,000 points from 103K to 84K. Not too bad at all considering more than 70% of our visitors are FireFox users.
Will the ranking stand? I guess only time will tell, but for now I think I can safely say that adding the Alexa widget to your site will indeed improve your ranking. In the next few weeks, I’ll follow up again and see just how far we can take the ranking using this widget alone.
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I wonder whether it actually did make a difference or not, Chris. Mine jumped even more than that without using the widget, and I don’t see a noticeable increase when looking at your Alexa graph.
What I do see, though, is you replacing a week that had no traffic 3 months ago with a week that had lots of traffic. Since Alexa is a three-month rolling average, you’ll see big jumps if your blog is new even if your traffic was flat week over week.
yeah, you might be right Shane. I might have gotten a little ahead of myself just because it made such a big jump in so little time. It’s probably more an artifact of Fuzzy Future traffic finally starting to register like you said…
I may be wrong, too. The important thing was just getting back above hem acharya on your Top Commentators
I just installed the widget recently. It will be interesting to see how it impacts the growth of my site. I am surprised how significant it is.
Though I am a bit embarrassed about my alexa ranking (>1m) I have just installed the widget to see what happens…
I’ll let you know!
I recently installed it as well. I’d like to see if it makes a difference. It will be hard to tell though because my rank has been jumping a few thousand places every few days. I though in a little CSS to hide the ugly embarrassing widget though. If this does work, then why can’t we just load up like 5 widgets? Would that make a difference?
A greater than 1 million Alexa ranking is nothing to be embarrassed about. If you have a site that is frequented by a strongly non-IE based community (this site has over 75% non-IE visitors) you really haven’t stood much a chance at all in improving your rank.
To be honest, I think the only reason Fuzzy Future has any rank at all is from random visits from StumbleUpon and Digg. Most of our regular readers are FireFox users or wouldn’t install the Alexa toolbar anyway.
That is the whole problem with Alexa in the first place. A good site with decent traffic can look MUCH worse then it actually is simply because it doesn’t get a very specific set of visitors. That’s why I hope the Alexa widget is at least helping out a bit.
Many Firefox users, myself included, use the Search Status extension which actually does report back to Alexa like their toolbar does — although I turn it off when I come here since I’m trying to catch up to your Alexa rank
So can anyone confirm that the widget actually does help? My site’s traffic is almost 80% firefox.