I'm a fairly new blogger. I have read numerous articles about how to improve my Alexa rank.
I've read my share of of "25 Ways to Improve Your Alexa Score", "5 Surefire Tips to Improve Your Alexa Rank", and "Here's An Article About Alexa Score I Copied And Pasted From Someone Else Because This Topic is So Popular it I Bet it Will Give me More Visitors", yada, yada, yada.
The conclusion I have come to, is the only 100% known way to HELP your Alexa rank, over and above just growing the number of visitors to your site, is to get people who have the Alexa toolbar installed visit your site.
Unfortunately, I've learned that a large percentage of them are webmasters and tech people and such - not exactly the niche group that wants to read "Carole's Thoughtful Spot", huh?
However, it's like this big mystery - how exactly do they "compute" your traffic and page views and what not in order to come up with your Alexa rank? Is there a piece of scratch paper lying in the bottom of a safe somewhere guarded by lions with this information? (A piece of scratch paper with the formula for Google Page Rank is probably in there with it.) Or is there some guy in the basement of the Alexa building paid minimum wage to spin a big wheel of random numbers that determines your number, or what? Because even the most brilliant of minds cannot seem to figure out their system. And apparently they even recently changed this system, or "algorithm", you know, just in case anyone was getting close to figuring it out.
The only reason *I* even care about this is that in my mind I think that once I get my traffic rank under the "magic" 200,000 the floodgates will open with the high paying sponsored ad offers. (Hey, let me have my fantasy.) My current weekly rank is 203,811, though my 3 month average is higher. You can see my "official" rank there on the right of my sidebar. I think if you click on it you can see my current stats. I keep it there so I can enjoy a little pang of discouragement every time I see it.
However, on the bright side, my Alexa rank HAS been improving over time. Thing is, I'm not even quite sure how I'm managing this, other than I'm trying to get more visitors via Entrecard and other means.
Until Turnip comes out with a post saying he's figured out Alexa, I guess I'll continue groping in the dark for the elusive "under 200,000"...
The end.
P.S. My understanding is that Alexa is owned by Amazon, and criminy - I buy a LOT from Amazon - shouldn't that count for something? Can't I get a little traffic-rank-love for buying the Jonas Brothers' new cd??
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Funny you mention that. My alexas have been about 900k recently when they should have been 40k. I know because I follow such things and compare data on my main site to other sites. My other blogs share the same visitors, and they have alexas of 300k with only 30 visitors a day. Meanwhile my main blog gets 500-1000 visitors and has the 900k alexa. Sadly, their crappy system has once again cost me money by getting my blog rejected from another ad network that uses alexa to rate blogs.
ReplyDeleteThen 3 things all happened about the same day. Entrecard released the toolbar, I went to the alexa site and clicked every button there that was a request of some sort to index my site. Finally I wrote them a letter saying "People are telling me you are blacklisting my site, is this true?". Well, my traffic actually went down this week from the previous two weeks, but guess what, my alexa rank improved 800k points. Yeah, go figure.
Alexa recently changed how they rate sites and it's now not dependent up on the toolbar. When they did that, I saw my score go up a bit, but over the past few months, it's gotten back down to what it was before the change.
ReplyDeleteI've also read that they penalize EntreCard visits, but I haven't seen that to be the case either.
As for earning money from ads -- I think it's a huge crap shoot. If you're a niche blog, talking about hot topics, you have a better chance, but if you're like you and me, talking about different stuff that's 50% or more on a personal level, then we're just going to have to take our Ad Sense check in the year 4100.
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Good comments on ranking although I agree with the previous comment; it is a huge crap shoot. Concentrate on quality content mixed with longevity and some fundemental SEO techniques and the rankings will come.
ReplyDeleteLOl, I like Margaret's Comment. I'm not so concerned about higher paying posts, i just want MORE. I only started doing them recently and i like it, but i can see I really need to get to a rank 3 at least to get some of the ones i find really interesting. The stupid thing about it.........how many mommy blogs do you read daily? I probably read close to 450 and ya know what? They aren't ranked high. I have Not one clue who other than maybe John Chow, turnip and one other that may be ranked pretty high and other than turnip, I don't read them. It would seem to me if advertisers want to reach their target audiences, they should put the opportunities in more areas that we read. I have a rank 2 blog, which i'm proud of, since it's been less than a year that I started it, but i have a good many readers and comments where I see high rank blogs that i don't even hear anyone saying they like much less read. If I were an advertiser, looking for mommy traffic, my opps would be for blogs written by mommies with at least 200-500 visitors per day. Maybe I need to learn more about marketing though..who knows.
ReplyDeleteHoly cow, I've never even heard of an Alexa ranking! Color me a loser!
ReplyDeleteAlexa is a very important benchmark to determine the rankings and traffic of sites. Google is placed at the 2nd position as per Alexa rankings and traffic rankings and is facing tough competition from Live.com and of course Yahoo.
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