A lot of people believe that Alexa has little to offer. This may or may not be true. I believe that Alexa still has something to offer.
Many people freak out. "Oh my, they want me to install a toolbar that sends out information on where I have been and what I have been doing." Are you involved in some activity you shouldn't be involved in? Don't worry. We looked at the packet info being sent back to Alexa data centers. Nothing that can really identify you. Yes, IP info is transferred, but every site you visit has the capabilities of acquiring that information. So sit back and relax if you install the toolbar. Which you can download here. That is Alexa's website. I wouldn't download the Alexa toolbar from anywhere but the Alexa website.
With the toolbar installed on a few systems, each with its' own IP. Go and set each of these machines home page url to the home page of the site you want to boost. We did this and in a 3 month period went from over 24,000,000 to 700,000. You say wait, don't you want a higher number. No. In Alexa the lower the number the better.
In our test we see that getting below a million can be done in 90 days. Once you get down in the 700,000 thousand range, it gets tougher. You are now actually battling for a lower number.
The only way to get a lower number is to get more people with the toolbar to visit your site. . What needs to be understood is, that the more hits the data centers receive and from different Alexa users, the lower your number. So what do we do? Get your friends, fans, or family to install the toolbar and have them visit your website daily.
That will help. But isn't there anything else I can try?
We heard a lot about "Auto-Surfers", so we looked into what they do. UpMyRank is an auto-surfer that claims to be the best. We gave them a test run. And to our surprise... It does work. But it also requires some work. Even though it does help. UpMyRank does not deliver 100% of the hits you earn. We had 598 hits to use, so we did. The number of hits we received was 32. See bottom of this page for links to auto-surfers that may assist in generating Alexa traffic results. Also there are several banner exchange sites listed as well and some new comers to traffic monitoring. UPDATE: It is our advice that if you use UpMyRank to make sure you update all of your anti-malware and anti-virus products. Also make sure that they are running in resident mode. UpMyRank does not check to see if the sites they help promote are legit. We saw many sites try and load malware onto us. And in the late evening they allow PORN sites to swap for a better ranking. Porn sites are known for harbouring malware, viruses, trojans, and other nastiness.
Now they claim on their site that by using them, you may experience an increase in your number (remember we want the number to go down, not up) but not to worry. We were stuck around 714,000 for about 3 days. We ran the auto-suffer for 3 days accumulating the number of points we needed to start our own campaign. We went down 100,000 in the first 12 hours to around 600,000. We started around 3am in the morning and by 3pm we had dropped. There are a few draw backs on this auto-surfer. First you have to spend at least 2 days accumulating enough points to start. You must have 1000 points before you can start having others visit your site. This is hampered by the other users on the system. Some users, use bad tactics to make your browser stall on their site. UpMyRank provides a "Report this site" feature, but the tactics used by the bad users, prevents you from reporting them with that feature. We opened up a separate browser window. Then opened the admin console. We were then able to copy the URLs and paste them in to report. We do not consider the auto-surf to be auto. It requires you to sit and monitor, thus taking away the auto. We paused our surfing for a few days and noticed very quickly that our numbers started heading in the opposite directions. Yes, if you do not continuously work at directing traffic, your numbers will go the other way.
We also found that UpMyRank has many holes in their system. We won't get into that until we have had a chance to inform them of these holes. The one big disappointment is, that the stats or number of hits they claim to send, is a bit off from reality. Our server logs and counters show that the number they claim they have sent to us is off by several thousand hits. Another draw back to all auto-surfers is, well not everyone who joins them plays nicely. We encountered many sites that threw up popups that would not let the auto surfer continue to the next page as it is intended to do. These popups cause your browser to hang on their site. Many of the other traffic exchange sites have ways to keep this from happening, but not UpMyRank. We also had to make sure our anti-virus was up to date. Many attempted to inject trojans and viruses on to our systems. The point being is that most, if not all, have a very hard time policing their systems. They rely on the users to report these injection attempts. Many probably have no idea that they have been hit and infected.
The system does work to a point, but has major flaws. We have seen our numbers improve, but only a little. Getting down to 100,000 is not easy and once you do, you are battling daily to keep that rank.
Many may feel that this is gaming the SEO system. Yes and No. You are generating traffic to your site. But is it real traffic? When we did the auto-surf we would view some of the websites, but in no way did we actually view every site that came up. It appears that the viewers being sent to us did the same thing. Many did venture through other pages and links on our site, but a lot also were simply adding credits and did not click on any of our other links or view other pages on our site. PR is all about getting as many as you can to visit your site. Even if it is for a small amount of time. The viewer may decide later on to stop back by. We also recommend a that you provide an easy way to allow your visitors to bookmark your site. There are many Java scripts to help with this, just Google them. Also, don't do it as a popup. Place a link in plain site that says hey bookmark us, click here. I can't stand it when a site pushes their bookmark at me. Those sites never see me again.
There is no magical way to up your Alexa rank. We suggest not wasting your time with auto-surfers and promises of tricking the ranking software. Start a campaign that encourages users that visit your site regularly to install the toolbar. Get current Alexa toolbar users to come check out your site. An important part of your campaign should be in getting DMOZ.org to list you in their search directory. Make relevant websites. This is what draws users to you. Keep your site fast. Do not load it down with stuff that will slow it down, i.e. flash and too much Java are prime examples. Trade links with sites that have content related to yours. This will help both of you. When contacting a site about trading links, tell them how it can help boost their rankings and help draw users to both of your websites. Look for sites that have similar content as yours. Google really likes seeing that the sites you link to and that link to you, are of similar content, or at the very least offer something relevant to those who would visit your site. If you are offering a service, get those using your service to link back to you from their website. Reciprocal linking is very important.
Quantcast is somewhat accurate and provides another point for gathering stats. I'll get into the somewhat accurate in a minute. Quantcast gives you html code to paste into your site. They track the number of hits simply by counting how many times their snippet is hit when someone visits your site. The somewhat is that for some reason or another their hit counts are off. Could be a number of things that cause this, but it leaves them in the same boat as the others. Comjuice uses Alexa and Quantcast stats, so they are no more accurate than anyone else. Even Googles Page Rank is an estimate. It appears that any tracking system has its flaws. If your looking to get advertisers to pay you for posting links or banners to them, then you will want to pull data from as many sources as you can. If your just looking for bragging rights, then any of these will work. Just look for the one posting the best stat and paste it on your page.
Our best recommendation is to join as many traffic exchanges as you can. We will list the ones we found to be the best. Check back soon.
Topic and content:
PR,rankings,Alexa,toolbar,upmyrank,rate,promote,Alexa toolbar,rank,SEO,Search,Engine,Optimization,traffic,links,backlinks,status
