On June 1st, I post the “Increase page ranking with DIY marketing strategies” on my blog after I implement my DIY marketing strategies on my blog. In just less than a week, I have found my Alexa traffic ranking dramatically increased from 5million to 2 million. WOW. Is that a success or just lucky?
This is a snap shop of my Alexa page ranking on June 1st, 2007. It was ranked as 5,857,920. My goodness. That is really low.
This is a snap shop of my Alexa page ranking on June 8th, 2007. It’s now 2,215,547. WOW. What a improvement in just 7 days.
For just 7 days, I can’t really tell you if my DIY marketing strategies works or not, but I can definitely tell you what I have done in the past 7 days to improve my Alexa traffic ranking. I will also tell you why I found the Alexa traffic ranking did not and will not do anything good to me. You will understand my reasons why I stop paying attention on Alexa traffic ranking.
First of all, the screen of my site was old. I have since changed my blog template to the new one two months ago. So Alexa did not update my screen. As I mentioned in the previous post, I use Alexa redirect to redirect traffic to my blog. Well. The only two places I used the Alexa redirect were on that post and on MyBlogLog.com page list. I took it out on June 6th, 2007 after reading the following blogs on the Internet, which claimed Alexa does not work and sucks.
Why Alexa sucks.
http://www.mapelli.info/alexa/3-reasons-why-alexa-sucks-and-they-know-it
So. I took the Alexa redirect out on June 6th, 2007. So there is only up to 6 days that my redirect will work for me and move me up more that 2.6 million spots. That is unbelievable. I checked my FeedBurner, Google Analytic, MyBlogLog page viewing status and my hit counter. I found there is no traffic or click actually happening on my Alexa redirect link. The only person is clicking on the redirect link is myself. Well. I have no idea how many of my viewers have Alexa toolbar installed. According to the above two blogs, viewer from China have higher chance to have Alexa toolbar installed. So I might have had high traffic from China. Not really. My traffic are primary from USA and Europe and 1/3 of them are RSS feed subscriber. Let’s assume that 100% of my viewer have Alexa toolbar installed? Do you? Then. How many pages views and unique users in that 6 days period could push me up twice fast than any web sites in between 5M and 2M?
So the Alexa redirect and Alexa toolbar won’t do much to move me up 2.6 million spots. So what does it? I find it interesting so I did the following test. I did a query against my domain name over 20 times everyday in the last 7 days on Alexa. I have another web site with traffic ranking 7449109(7M), which has 3 times traffic than this blog site. How can a web sites with much more traffic get lower traffic ranking? And how much traffic is that? My web site doesn’t have a lot of traffic comparing with many of my viewer’s web sites. I got average 80 unique users and 400 pages view per day. That is nothing to me. I need to drive more traffic to my web sites. Please help me spread the world. Would you please? 
With 20 queries everyday, does it help to push my traffic ranking up so fast? I will continue to do the queries for the next 2 weeks to see if it does the trick. Obviously, the Alexa traffic ranking doesn’t do it claims to do. It’s not accurate. It’s not calculate correct. How come web sites in China are on the top 100 in most of the case?
| Country | Users | (previously) |
|---|---|---|
| China | 16.44% | (18.46%) |
| United States | 14.28% | (36.91%) |
| Brazil | 3.82% | N/A |
| Japan | 3.64% | (3.80%) |
| United Kingdom | 3.11% | (4.49%) |
| Taiwan | 2.91% | (1.72%) |
| Hong Kong | 2.55% | (4.59%) |
Above blog shows a chart that China have most of the Alexa toolbar population (Source Link). I know exactly why. Last year, I traveled to China for 3 months, China have Internet cafe everywhere. Their access fee is so cheap. It’s average US$1.00/hour. You see all young people hanging out at Internet cafe all day and all the time. That’s where new generation of Chinese social with friends. I see Alexa tool bar and many other toolbars on all of their PCs. If you are a toolbar programmer, you will want to send your toolbar to China. People make $$$ on installing toolbar on PCs. Can you believe that?
So if you know some Chinese, you can post your web URL on their forum, make friends with them and have them click on your link. You might get high Alexa traffic ranking shortly. However, it does nothing to my web site. I know some advertisement company like Text-Link-Ad will check your Alexa ranking before publish ad on your site. And some payperpost (PPP) company do that too. What I need is a good quality content for people read and to help people who might come back to help me as well.
So I decide to get rid of any Alexa related implementation. One interesting thing happening for the past few days after I post the “Increase page ranking with DIY marketing strategies“. I got tremendous traffic from StumbleUpon.com. Now 80% of the visitors from StumbleUpon.com are hitting that post. WOW. I am talking about 100 unique users for just that one page.
I truly believe that a good content and social network relationship with other blogger will bring in the traffic. Alexa traffic ranking and Google page ranking may just make your web site looks better. I have seen many doorway web site have page ranking 6, but they are full of adsense advertisement and junk information. What’s the point?
Here is my conclusion. Alexa is just a tools which misleading people by going after that magic number. Who is the winner? Alexa. That market themselves so well that people think they can’t make $$$ without Alexa.
thanks for the pingback
the redirect trick you used can be pretty useful for (artificially) increasing the alexa stats… it’s
one more reason not to trust alexa
I’m gonna do some testing
p.s. you’ve a new rss subscriber
Thanks. I accidentally found your blog and find it useful. I also added you to my Daily reading blog list. on BlogLines, Google Readers and FireFox live bookmark …
By the way, I love pizza!
Thanks!
It’s a great post to punch Alexa face…
Thanks for the information. I just read another article on search engine submission companies that do not really “submit” to all of the places promised in their generous advertising ads. I feel like a victim of legal fraud.
Can you suggest a company that could help a new online writing community? I am currently using Website Pros, Visibility online program; however I am not sure if I am actually getting what I’m paying for.
How do you know when a company is doing its job?
Hope I have not droned on too much here, I have been at my desk the entire day researching and posting links for the site. It is very time consuming. Something has to work though.
–All the best,
Katina M. Woodruff
Owner of One Stop Write Shop
@Katina:
I have never trust those search engine submission. I always do that myself. Basically, I only pay attention on few search engines. Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. It take times to get your site indexed. So be patient. You can read a post on my blog about “Easiest way to get listed on Google“.
The most important thing is to make your site for your viewers. When you have enough good quality content, people will come to you from search engine. Good luck!
I’ve had my first blog set up for about 2 weeks and these are my stats:
Alexa Rank: 3,205,059
Technorati Rank: 8,911,336
Average Unique Visitors Per Day: 3
Highest Unique Visitors Per Day: 6
It is connected to my main domain website (cashmachine101.com), though that has had less than 100 unique visitors in 3 months and the content and SEO is poor. I mainly advertise on a free traffic exchange, on which I use the Alexa redirect to my blog. I also submitted my website to search engines using a free service (before I added the blog). I’ve been adding a post or two every couple of days and plenty of outgoing links.
What do guys think? Maybe a combination of fresh blog content and the way the blog’s set up?
@Michael:
The key to get decent traffic is the quality of your content. Alex page ranking, Google page rank doesn’t mean anything. You need to get your content index by search engine to get decent traffic. Social with your viewers is also important.
If you just want to get short term traffic, check out StumbleUpOn related post on my blog. Get some traffic from StumbleUpOn will give you a good start.
Good luck!
Near the beginning of my blogging experience, I have found that it is possible to increase Alexa rank above 1 million by simply installing the Search Status Firefox extension and posting regularly from the WordPress interface. The number of hits and page views that get recorded by simply surfing around my own blog while writing and editing posts was enough to bring it up to about 400,000 pretty quickly.
To raise the ranking much above that, it seems that one has to be more proactive in the search for traffic – things like blog carnivals, social bookmarking sites, and interactions with other webmasters can help with this.
@Karl Erfurt:
Thank you for stopping by. I have heard about that Alexa page ranking below 1M are basically useless. However, to get your blog or web site ranked top 100K is getting more more difficult. It’s possible to get in 100K in just one or two weeks. You simply invite people to stumbleUpOn your site frequently or get your post dugged.
As I mentioned in my post, you Alexa traffic ranking will boost dramatically, if you can get people read your blog from China.
Fake Alexa Rankings under top 100K
How many travelers from China visit Greece? About 50.000 – 70.000 per year according to Greece National Tourism Organization. So how can a Travel Guide for Greece have 74.3% visitors from China? (without Chinese language). View Greece Travel sites listed by Alexa Ranking at http://www.hit360.com/toptravelsites/ and see how fake Alexa ranking can be
@Manos:
There is company who buys the ad space on computer in the Internet cafe in China. If you can get your blog read by Chinese, you can pretty much get a great high Alexa ranking. I believe that there are software load the web page without user’s awareness.
I used to watch my Alexa rankings like a hawk. I now rely on Google analytics for my info. Alexa and PR are important if you are trying to get paid advertising, other than that, it is our own ego that keeps us refreshing the ranking sites.
@Tristan:
ha! You are right. We sometimes feel guilty not to check our Alexa ranking status. However, it is not very useful, if you don’t do advertisement on your site.
interesting. i read though that advertisers take this rank into account when rating blogs. so perhaps that’s where it can come in handy?