Whether we should trust alexa ranking or not?

Alexa over the years is becoming a popular site to show whether your site is receiving traffic or not and helps you optimize it up to some bit by providing some of the useful keywords. But still there always remain a doubt whether alexa is truly reliable or not.

My answer would be NO. Alexa calculates rank on a very particular type of algorithm. These algorithms are:

  1. Whether person visiting the site have alexa toolbar installed or not because if the user have alexa toolbar installed than only it will be counted as traffic otherwise not.
  2. Most probably those sites dealing with webmaster stuff usually have good alexa ranking because most of their users have alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.

I had experience of visiting many that really have good amount of traffic but don’t have good alexa rank. Also keep in my mind that alexa rank can be improved very easily by installing the toolbar and visiting your own site frequently. That thing actually works!

You can download Reload After Sometime extension for Firefox and set it to reload after a particular gap of time. and than you can see how your alexa ranking goes up within a day.

WARNING—– Don’t set the time too low because it can cause some serious issues to your website. One minute will be good if you are in shared hosting and 30 seconds will be good if you are on Dedicated Server. Also please notice that by following this technique on a adsense enabled site is dangerous. You can lose your account also. SO USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

SOME OF THE FEW TIPS TO INCREASE YOUR ALEXA RANK LEGALLY

1. Use Alexa Toolbar:

Download the Alexa Toolbar and install it in your web browser and visit your blog daily. The Toolbar is only available for the IE and Firefox web browsers. For chrome, you can use this Extension SEO Status Pagerank/Alexa Toolbar. This is the most basic step to increase your Alexa rank.

2. Use Alexa Widget:

Place an Alexa Widget your blog. Alexa offers Traffic Graph, Site Stats Button and Traffic Rank Button widgets and they come in different sizes too. Select anyone of these and customize it and place it your blog.

3. Use Alexa Redirects:

When you provide a link to your blog in forum signatures or Email signatures, use the Alexa redirect URL. For example, When I provide links in signatures, I am using http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?ub7.net. Some people claimed using this technique helps them to increase their Alexa rank, although there is no official proof.

4. Post Frequency:

Try to update your blog frequently with good articles. If you don’t have time to update your blog contents daily, then try to update on alternative days. Alexa rank will automatically improve if you post frequently.

5. Write about Alexa:

There are many bloggers and webmasters who want to learn the secret or the tips to improve their Alexa Rankings. So, if you write an Article on how to increase Alexa rank, they will link back to you, which results in targeted traffic for your blog.

6. Use Alexa Reviews:

Ask your friends and colleagues, to write a review about your blog in Alexa and rate your Alexa website profile. Some webmasters and bloggers claimed this tip is working for them, but I am not entirely sure of its impact on rankings. Anyway, you are most welcome to write a Review for Ub7.net.

7. Use Social Media Sites:

Try to take advantage of social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. For this you should write good contents, since most of the online users, share worthy and interesting contents to Social Media sites. Since these sites will bring a massive amount of traffic for your blog, it will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank.