Should You Use Alexa Redirects to Increase Alexa Rank?
Published August 16th, 2007 in Alexa Rank, SEO/Traffic/Links, blogging, blogsThis is a question I’ve wondered about since the idea was suggested to me by a reader. The idea is to use Alexa redirects on the internal links on your blog in order make sure that all the traffic to your blog is counted by Alexa. On the surface this sounds like it might be a good idea, but there are problems with it, primarily with SEO.
Andy Beard has written at length on some linking mistakes frequently found on blogs. As you would expect from Andy, it’s quite detailed and the information is the gospel as far as linking goes. One of the great points he brings up is to always use good anchor text in your links. For an example, see the words that comprise the link to his article in this paragraph? That’s what I’m talking about. It gives meaning to the link that the search engines can grab on to. For a much better explanation, follow the link.
Back to the Alexa redirect issue. Andy also points to another article that gives the final word on Alexa redirects. This article by Lord Matt gives some SEO basics and Alexa Rank mistakes and should be read carefully by those interested in knowing more about SEO or Search Engine Optimization, if you have been wondering about the acronym. It’s a great article with plenty of well-done graphics and valuable information.
These posts should help to put to rest some of the questions regarding Alexa Rank. My own Alexa Rank has been falling lately and I’m not entirely sure why. The big question is why do advertising services like Text-Link-Ads still use Alexa Rank as part of their price setting equation? I can’t imagine using such an arbitrary measure (it only counts traffic if visitors have the Alexa toolbar or certain other plugins installed) in setting a price for advertising. The fact that it is completely unreliable in measuring real traffic has been established over and over again.
Regardless, the issue of using Alexa Redirects appears to have been settled. Read the posts I’ve linked to above and you’ll come out with a much better understanding of why this is so.
I agree with the Andy’s conclusion regarding link juice: *theoretically*, an Alexa redirect should direct link goodness to your blog, but there’s no way to know, and if not, you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot.
Hi Sam. Yep. It’s too much of an unknown to risk losing PageRank over it. Thanks for commenting!
This is good reading on Alexa !
Thanks, Jaklang. There has been so much speculation about Alexa Rank that it’s great to get some real answers.
when i started to increase my alexa rank i used the redirect from alexa to my website, and installed the alexa toolbar and would flick through the my pages a few times so alexa know that the pages are there and my alexa increased but that was about 3 months ago and i left it since then and it shot back up again
Yep. I’ve noticed that Alexa seems to be very fickle. I don’t like seeing my rank going down, but I’m not overly concerned about it as traffic levels don’t seem to have declined. I really don’t think the Alexa toolbar is very widely used. They really should think of a better method of gauging traffic. Thanks for commenting!
Until I read this post, I knew nothing about Alexa redirects. I appreciate the information as I handle SEO for several companies. Keep the good info coming.
John
the alexa redirect no longer works so do you have any other suggestions?