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 first started looking at Alexa Rank when Yaro at Entrepreneur’s Journey posted on the effect the Alexa Rank Widget was having on his blog. His theory was that having the widget there was causing an increase in his ranking. Others believed that the widget has no effect whatsoever on Alexa Rank and have evidence from Alexa to prove it.

I suppose the increase I’ve noticed has come from a growth in traffic as well as my own use of the SearchStatus plugin for FireFox which displays both Alexa Rank and Google PageRank. SearchStatus also has some other cool features for checking out SEO and link related statistics for websites. I’ve found it useful for getting a snapshot of how popular a site really is without having to do a bunch of research.

I’m trying not to be a crazed stats watcher, but it’s hard not to take notice of this stuff when blogging is the topic I’m often blogging about. If you want to set goals for your blog, it’s important that these goals be measurable so that you can gauge your progress. This milestone is one of the goals that I’ve set to achieve for this blog and I’m happy to have made it this far.

Regardless of what happened, I’m happy to finally see it showing up on my Firefox SearchStatus plugin. It’s nice to actually see things in a consistent way for a change. When I navigate to FreshBlogger.com, I now see that nice little green bar showing PageRank 5 and also an Alexa Rank that keeps improving (today it’s showing 165,988). I swear I’m not becoming a stats junkie. Honestly, I can quit checking all the time whenever I want…

Here are some of the tools I’ve used to check PageRank:

Visual PageRank (thanks to ProBlogger)
Check Page Rank (thanks to Mike)
Page Rank Checker
Live PR (thanks to Adnan)

Just to take a snapshot of where this site is: the domain is now about 6 months old. Alexa Rank is currently showing at 295,423. Technorati is showing something like 100 inbound links from around 70 sites (these numbers change so I’m not sure how accurate they are). This morning, the feedburner graphic in the sidebar is showing 140 subscribers.

It seems like PR 5 is legitimate. So why isn’t it showing up on my toolbar? Is anybody else seeing it?

For this blog, I’m still waiting to see anything show up for the toolbar PageRank. Right now, it’s showing at zero, although the Alexa Rank continues to improve. At the time of this writing, the Alexa Rank showing on my toolbar is 383,643. That’s quite a bit of difference from what it was before I installed the Alexa Rank Widget. While it appears to have been confirmed that the widget has no effect on Alexa Rank, there still remains the mystery as to why the numbers have changed so much in so little time.

It’s possible that the age of FreshBlogger.com has hit a certain milestone according to Alexa and that this has helped. It’s also possible that actions I’ve taken to improve search engine optimization, such as finally redirecting from my old blogger blog, or adding XHTML and XML sitemaps, have contributed. It seems likely that both Google PageRank and Alexa Rank are somehow intertwined, but I don’t know how or for sure.

Have any of you out there seen any positive (or negative) changes yet in this PageRank update?

This does sound like a pretty final response on the issue, carrying the official weight of Alexa. I know that some people won’t be convinced and I have some doubts myself. However, I’m going to forget about the issue for now. I’ll also leave the widget on my sidebar. In light of Mark’s revelation, though, it might be better to replace it with a link or button for downloading Alexa’s Toolbar. Thanks to Mark for helping to clear things up.