The Ultimate Alexa Redirect Experiment: Results are in!

Last Tuesday I started The Ultimate Alexa redirect Experiment. At last the results are here! We were trying to find out if having people visit your site via the Alexa redirect (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://matt608.blogspot.com) actually increases Alexa ranking like so many blogs claim it does.

The Data:
Remember this is blog science so I'm not about to calculate the standard deviation! There are far too many sources of error, (which I will outline), for that to be of any use. At first glance it may look like there was too little data to work with, but all is not as it may seem...

At the beginning of the Experiment Successful online money making ! had an Alexa rank of:

251,591. It has now risen by 31,550 to
220,041

There were a total of just 23 clicks of the redirect I placed with on this blog as part of the experiment. Thankfully Mybloglog came to the rescue!. I used a redirect to send people from Mybloglog to here. I only use free mybloglog stats which record the last 7 days of activity, rather than the 9 days that the experiment ran for. However, the chances are that the some of the people who visited via Mybloglog clicked the redirect again here, and voted that they did so (it has no effect to click it twice), which helps even out the odds.

There were 37 clicks on the Mybloglog redirect.
There were 23 clicks on the on-site redirect
Making 50 total clicks!

Overview
- Put simply, it all 'averages out' and 50 redirect clicks is a pretty accurate figure.
- Before the experiment started this sites Alexa ranking and stopped increasing, it had formed a plateau.
- Traffic had actually decreased early on in the experiment (I failed to post daily) but I doubled back up again a few days ago.

This means that on average there was less traffic during the experiment than before when the Alexa ranking had stopped increasing. Despite this, the Alexa rank increased a noticeable amount. The traffic increased (up to the same amount as before) due to my post called What the Ancient Egyptians taught me about blogging. Alexa Viewbar users tend to be more numerous in tech sites, and so this burst of users are unlikely to be the cause of the increase in Alexa rankings.



Above is a screenshot of the Alexa 'reach' graph for this site. The big red arrow points to the increase in apparent reach since I started the experiment.

The Conclusion
Using the Alexa redirect does increase Alexa rankings! I am very pleased to announce this because using the Alexa redirect is so simple! There have been so may posts containing ‘Alexa tips’ that have no proof that they actually work; well, now we do!

What can we draw from all this?
What this does show is how easy it is to manipulate the Alexa rankings. This isn't an 'black hat' technique, Alexa have not said they disapprove of this. If anything, using the Alexa redirect is sending them more data, which they must like. If you are glad to hear this news then go ahead and make the most of it. I know I will be.

Alexa: The Definitive Review

What is Alexa?

Alexa released their Toolbar in 1997 and by using the data, which is constantly being collected from over 10million toolbar users; they have formed the largest and most comprehensive traffic ranking system on the Internet. Alexa also has Websearch which incorporates Toolbar data to give a more varied spread of results than 'normal' search engines like Google. There are many common misconceptions about Alexa that hopefully this review will clear up.

The Toolbar data is divided up into main three categories:

1. Reach is the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. For example, “if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that of all global Internet users measured by Alexa, 28% of them visit yahoo.com”
2. Page Views is the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once.
3. Traffic Rank (the main Alexa Rank) is based on the geometric mean of Reach and Page Views averaged over time.

Alexa have revealed some tasty information on their blog about how their ranking system works.

Additional Important Details
- Alexa only provides rankings for sites which Toolbar users have visited in the past 3 months - all other sites will show no data" for their ranking.
- The closer a site is to #1, the more reliable its ranking is. Sites ranked over 100,000 do not have very reliable traffic rankings because Alexa has so little traffic data for them.
- The overall Traffic Rank is updated approximately every week

That’s quite a lot of fiddly information to take onboard! But there are very good reasons for understanding Alexa and getting a higher traffic rank.

Why does Alexa Matter?

1. Many third parties use the Alexa Traffic rank to form a judgement of the advertising value of your site. A higher ranking means they can charge Advertisers more money and you make more money as a result. (I am grouping selling text links, banners and sponsored posts all into this category).
2. A higher Alexa traffic rank means you can charge/negotiate a higher price selling advertising space directly to advertisers.
3. Having a high Alexa traffic rank is a great thing to brag/use to promote your site with. This has many possible uses, for example acquiring more beneficial link exchanges. It was recently announced that blogrolls still matter, namely for ranking highly in the Google Blogsearch. Telling a blogger you have a Alexa rank of say10,000 will defiantly make them think twice before ignoring your link exchange request.
4. Displaing your Alexa rank in a prominent position on your blog/website. Much like displaying the number of subscribers to your blog this should only be done with an impressive enough figure. Displaying this Alexa figure not only shows the popularity of your blog but may also remind your readers to use the Alexa Toolbar when visiting your site, which raises your ranking further.
5. A higher Alexa ranking gives you more authority in your niche. Although most webmasters know about Alexa's 'favour' towards Toolbar users it would defiantly give your voice more weight if you have a higher ranking compared to someone with a ranking in the millions.

Most webmasters don't realise the Toolbar is Alexa's only source of information calculating page views that they are more than 'skewing' the graphs in the Toolbar users favour. The effect, however, is that tech sites or sites aimed at more web savvy users will have an unfairly higher ranking than sites for 'normal people'.

Below is a section from the graph displaying this sites Reach compared to my newer sites’ reach.


Lately there has been a burst of talk about 'gaming the ranking systems'. I have myself have taken part in the Technorati Favourites Train (I would highly recommend you doing the same).

There are plenty of obvious ways to increase Alexa ranking. Most are much the same as increasing Google ranking; for a very good reason. Remember the number of visitors using theAlexa Toolbar determines ranking, therefore a higher ranking in Google (and other search engines) results in more traffic, and more Toolbar users visiting your site.

Is there another way get a higher Alexa ranking?

The answer is probably and you can help us all find out. On Tuesday I started The Ultimate Alexa Redirect Experiment

Using an Alexa redirect is the 'unofficial' ways to game the Alexa system. ‘They say’ people visiting you site through a redirect improves Alexa rank. This experiment aims to discover if it actually works or not. This "http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?" is placed in front of the URL. A redirect for this site is:

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://matt608.blogspot.com

An Alexa redirect only counts 'Once per day from an IP address'

How to take part in the Experiment

1. Click this Alexa redirect. (It will take you straight back to this site)

Click me I'm a re-direct!

2. Click in the box that you have clicked the redirect.

Did you take part?
	I clicked the re-direct today
	I don't believe in blog science
pollcode.com free polls

3. Come back tomorrow and repeat. The number of people who click each day determines how accurate and informative this experiment will be, so tell people about it!

EDIT: Please click the link even if you are using the toolbar. This site will be getting roughly the same number of visitors using the Alexa toolbar as it used to and so to make the experiment as fair as possible it is better if everyone clicks the redirect (and marks in the box that they did so). Thanks.

I will post the results on Wednesday unless I think it is necessary to extend the experiment.

You can download the Alexa toolbar here

Related Alexa reading:
20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank
The Alexa blogger blog
The Alexa FAQ (you would be surprised how few people have read it)

The Ultimate Alexa Redirect Experiment!

The Alexa ranking system uses many of the expected factors such as traffic and link popularity. However, some of us know the 'unofficial' ways to game the Alexa system. This doshdosh style experiment aims to discover if the number 1 unofficial method (the Alexa redirect) actually works or not.

Using the Alexa Redirect.

Placing this in front of the URL:

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?

So a redirect for this site is:

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://matt608.blogspot.com

An Alexa redirect only counts 'Once per day from an IP address' but how much effect does it actually have on the rankings? This experiment will last for one week and will finally give us some quantitative data about Alexa.

How to take part

1. Click this Alexa redirect. (It will take you straight back to this site)

Click me I'm a re-direct!

2. Click in the box that you have clicked the redirect.

Did you take part?
	I clicked the re-direct today
	I don't believe in blog science
pollcode.com free polls

3. Come back tomorrow and repeat. The number of people who click each day determines how accurate and informative this experiment will be, so tell people about it!

I will have these instructions and the poll posted at the top of every post for this week so you won't have to go rummaging around in the archives to find this post each day.

Successful online money making ! currently has an Alexa rank of 251,591. At the end of the 7-day experiment we can see if there is any increase and how big that increase is. (I will work out the averages and some graphs for you).