The other day we were asked the following question: “How can I increase my Alexa ranking?” Before we get into our view of the Alexa Ranking question, let us first fill you in on Alexa.

Alexa was started in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat. The company since it’s inception was based around a freely offered toolbar. As Alexa described it in the early the early days: “Alexa is a free advertising-supported Web navigation service…providing useful information about the sites you are viewing and suggesting related sites.” The Alexa Toolbar in it’s latest inception hasn’t really diverged that far from the original goal. The current Alexa Toolbar offers related sites, traffic trends, reach meter, Alexa traffic rank, and many more tools.

Alexa.com, was also instrumental in the creation of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and donated “a copy of the internet” to the Library of Congress in 1998. Alexa also supplies the Internet Archive with web crawls. In 1999, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for about $250 million in Amazon stock. You can read the history of Alexa at wikipedia to get more details.

No discussion about Alexa would be complete without touching on the spyware debate. If you decide to download the Alexa Toolbar you will need to inevitably face this issue. Most anti-spyware softwares and virus scans will block Alexa. Alexa has addressed the issue of spyware and ad-aware in their FAQ’s in several places. The summarized answer from the folks from Alexa is the following: “No, the Alexa Toolbar is not spyware…Spyware is defined as hidden software that is installed on your computer without your knowledge… It generally collects your personal information for advertising purposes, and provides you with no value in return….The Alexa Toolbar is only installed when a user chooses to download it – it is not installed without your knowledge. The Toolbar is not hidden, it is prominently displayed at the top of your browser. In order to fill the Toolbar with relevant information, the URL of the page you’re on is transmitted to us and we return related information for that page. We have an easily accessed privacy policy which is presented at the time of download and in the Alexa drop down menu in your Toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar can be turned off at any time. Turning the Toolbar off prevents any information from being transmitted to us. Alexa never attempts to identify individual users, and you are not required to enter any personal information to use the Toolbar. If you feel that the features of the Alexa Toolbar are not of value to you, the Toolbar is easily uninstalled using Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel of Windows.”

You will have to make your own decision who to believe. Personally, we believe Alexa has gotten a bad rap on this issue. The real thing that should make you wary of Alexa, is the accuracy of their information. The reality is the majority of users who use the Alexa Toolbar are people who are Webmasters trying to increase their rank. Installing the toolbar has been seen as an SEO technique by several SEO bloggers. The result of this biased audience coincides with biased stats. Looking at the top 100 USA sites brings the usual suspects, but as you make your way down the list you can see it’s effects– we don’t need to point them out to you, but it’s evident.

Alexa themselves announced changes to fix this, but their overall disclaimer remains, which is important for you to read: “The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.”

So now onto the question on hand about Alexa and ranking via a summary:

The problems with Alexa are:
* Alexa does not get you much direct traffic (unless you get into the top 100). It gets mostly Ego searches from webmasters looking at their own domain.
* Limited reach because toolbar needs to be installed. Most people will remove due to concerns about spyware. If someone has the Alexa toolbar installed chances are they are a webmaster, who knows what, and why they are installing. The average Joe and Jane will uninstall Alexa when prompted by their anti-virus software.
* With a small sample audience minor changes in site traffic can represent huge changes in Alexa rating
* In simplest terms, Alexa is truly biased toward a webmaster audience

Why do you hear so much about Alexa and why is it being promoted so heavily by some e-marketer’s?

* Sorry to say, though, it’s mainly ignorance–most people don’t read the fine print about how the stats are being generated. The rankings aren’t worth much-except for ego.
*Most people see graphs and rankings and think automatically it’s legit. Numbers can’t lie can they? (Note sarcasm) We get that it’s hard to believe. I mean who wouldn’t be concerned when you go to Alexa.com and see certain sites, maybe competitors websites, higher than yours. You are competitive and want your site  to be higher. But really, who cares about rank, if you don’t actually get more business?
* Another trick is the quick con of shady e-marketers by getting website owners to install the toolbar to inflate the stats by having them visit their own site, and sell the results back to them as being some kind of expert. People love numbers and graphs. Few ask questions on how the info is determined.
* Think of this, if we were pushing you to install the Alexa Toolbar, and we know you are a regular reader of this blog, then my Alexa rating would also rise (along with your site). In short, a pyramid scheme of Alexa ranking.

As you can imagine we don’t put much stalk in Alexa rank. It’s an interesting thing to look at, but it’s not that useful in our view. Nevertheless, we know there are many people who will still ignore most of this information and still want the answer to how to increase their rank on Alexa. So here it is. Create a custom Alexa Toolbar. Visit your site daily with it installed. Have all your friends and family install it, and remind them to ignore warnings from their anti-virus/adware/spyware software. Ask them to visit your site once a day/week. Offer the toolbar on your website to all your customers for download. And then the next step is to wait. Your rank will go up. We just hope this is not your only strategy, because a high Alexa rank might bring bragging rights, but not much else. If you want to actually get some strategies that work, contact Mark8t E-Marketing Solutions today.