Alexa ranking jumps 50% in 30 days
I first installed the Alexa widget which shows my blog traffic ranking on April 13 at 614,506. Today, it ranks 290,368. That's more than a 50% improvement in traffic ranking in just over 30 days. The jump wasn't a sudden leap. It was a hundred thousand jump every week. Just how does installing an Alexa widget on your homepage improve traffic ranking? Many people have doubted if the widget has indeed any direct effect on a blogs' ranking especially since some have reported little or no change in their ranking after doing so.
Alexa traffic ranking is second only to Google PageRank in terms of determining the authority of a blog - and for those who monetize their blogs - one of the key factors that sets the amount of fees you are able to charge for various programmes such as get paid to blog or paid reviews.
Just how is Alexa traffic ranking computed? From Alexa's site:
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.
Therefore, if you don't have the Alexa widget on your site, visitors with the Alexa Toolbar installed would not register with Alexa and thus your traffic ranking would be much higher. I'm not sure if a 50% jump in ranking is out of the ordinary. Maybe such increases happen all the time, but if your blog is languishing in the millions, it surely doesn't hurt to install the Alexa widget and Alexa Toolbar to try it out.
Some experts also recommend installing the Alexa traffic chart on your site and copying the site info txt file into the root directory or your site. To get yours, just replace with your website: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/contact_info?url=http://www.yoursite.com
Why am I so sure that the Alexa widget is at least partially responsible for the traffic improvement? That's because it's about the only thing I did differently in this blog. I don't have the Alexa Toolbar installed - just the widget. I did not step up my participation in forums and comments in other blogs - if anything, I have been slacking somewhat lately.
In any case, what harm is there to try it out for yourself if you'd like a better Alexa traffic ranking? Statistics I notice, are updated about once a week, so it would make sense to leave the widget for a couple of weeks to see if ranking changes.