Improve Your Alexa Rank - Without Really Trying

Note: The following tips will work best for smaller sites (such as this blog) with current page ranks higher than a few hundred thousand. However, they wont hurt any site (large or small) so feel free to give them a try.

In the beginning of my journey to Internet expertise, I thought that Alexa rank was the end-all of site rankings, I figured that there was some magic formula used to determine how many people were visiting a site each day - and that that magic formula (much like Google PageRank) would forever remain a mystery to me.

I was wrong.

Alexa rank is (as far as I can tell) limited to the amount of info it can gather from Alexa toolbar users, and in some cases has no real reflection of your actual rank as a site.

Don't believe me? Check out the page on Alexa that discusses how Alexa rank works.

Take special note of the following phrase from the "Some Important Disclaimers" section:

"The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population."

So - what does this mean to you and how can you use these minor flaws to the benefit of your rank?

Well, the "may not be a representative sample" bit is key. Because Alexa has to make an assumption about the number of toolbar users as a percentage of internet users as a whole - smaller sites can tip the scale in their favor.

How? Well, if Alexa assumes that one out of every 100 internet users has an Alexa toolbar (I'm just making up the numbers - but the example still works), and they get data back that says that one Alexa toobar user visited your site each day - they might assume that you get about 100 visits a day. For large sites with a broad appeal and a diverse set of users, these assumptions work just fine.

However, for a very small site (with very low traffic) the assumptions made by the Alexa technology can work in their favor. Lets say a small site gets three visitors a day, if no one that visits your site has an alexa toolbar (not even the creator) it will seem as though the site has no traffic and it will be doomed to remain on the alexa directory with no thumbnail and a horrible page rank. Now, if only one of those three visitors has the toolbar - it will seem to alexa that you have 100 visits a day (based on my made up figures from above). BUT - if all three of the users have the toolbar - it might seem as though you have 300 visitors a day. A great exaggeration from your actual traffic - and a great boost to your self-esteem.

So - for smaller sites - asking your regular userbase (your mom, your friends, etc) to add the Alexa toolbar can greatly inflate your page rank (and thus make all of your visitors super-visitors).

How quickly can you expect results? Well, the rank that you'll see on Alexa is an average of the last three months, so you wont see an immediate jump to whatever your rank is for today, but if you get your few dedicated users to keep coming back and keep using their Alexa toolbars - you'll slowly see your site creep up in rank.

For larger sites, making sure that your userbase is aware of the Alexa toolbar is never a bad idea (especially if your site tends to skew to an older or less web-savvy userbase - you may not be getting counted for all of the users you actually get simply because they aren't using the latest add-on features for their browsers).

Some added bonuses of Alexa add-ons.

If you install "sparky" you can see the Alexa rank of every site you visit and have easy access to the traffic summary pages of the sites you visit.

If everyone that reads this blog post installs an alexa toolbar or add-on, my blog may even get a boost (currently stands at around 2.7 million mark - yikes!).