I have never paid much attention to Alexa until the last few days. I first paid attention to the rating service when I applied for some affiliate programs and scored pretty low on the reimbursement levels because of my Alexa rank. My other ratings were pretty good - well okay anyway. But the Alexa rating is, well, not good.

The fact that rating was keeping me from getting better reimbursements from affiliate programs got me to trying to figure out how to get a better Alexa rating. In my looking around the internet I noticed that some blogs that do not have as many links or traffic as mine have better ratings, which I found frustrating. I realize this isn’t a ‘big blog’, but still ….

I’m told the ratings are pretty inaccurate - which makes me feel a little better - because the program measures through tracking how many users have installed the Alexa IE toolbar. That’s a problem for me since I use Firefox. But not to despair!

Well. I have been lurking around over at Connected Internet ever since I downloaded this blog template. After downloading the template I read some of the articles there and realized I liked what the guy writes. While lurking over there earlier today I ran across a series of articles at on just this subject.

He is conducting an experiment on ways to increase your rating with Alexa. His suggestions are listed as follows:

  1. Document your current rate (I added that).
  2. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
  3. Add an Alexa rank widget on your website.
  4. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers.
  5. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.military.rightpundits.com. Replace military.rightpundits.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help.

Again from Connected Internet

If sufficient numbers of your readers join the experiment and follow steps 1&3 then your Alexa Rank should definitely increase. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone sees any improvement from adding the Alexa rank widget.

I’m giving it a try - I hope you will too. This evening I have downloaded the Firefox SearchStatus extension. I’ve added the Alexa widget to my sidebar with the embarrassing ranking of 496,606. BAH! Why does that feel like telling your weight! I’m encouraging you to do the same. The only thing I haven’t done is add the redirects, which I will do tomorrow (the Lord willing and the creek don’t rise - as they say around here).

So we’ll see what happens.