Cheating all your way up to number one Alexa Rating

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To those who don’t know it yet (Hi Grandma), Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com,
It provides information on traffic levels for websites.
The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

While others will claim alexa’s rating is useless I’ll try to prove just the opposite,
Alexa has everything (almost) to do with site monetization

Why would you want to increase your Alexa rank?
As must webmasters and industry leaders will say (and I’ll agree)
Alexa rating is useless in determine your site’s position comparing to others.
BUT, Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks WILL use your Alexa ratings to try and determine the worth of a link on your website, so if you’re a Blog or Content site
(Or any site for that matter that hopes to sell links as a form of monetization) you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.

The main problem with the Alexa Rank.
Alexa’s rating will always go in favor of websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience, as they will always have more users with the toolbar installed
This is causing those communities to rank very high while other sites fall in rankings
Even if they actually have a lot more traffic then others.
Alexa has a stupid way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on your website.
I understand the all the problems of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.
I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but its perceived importance in the eyes of potential advertisers.

How do I get started with Alexa?
There are two easy ways to start using Alexa.
If you are using Internet Explorer, visit Alexa Toolbar Download page
And if you’re using FireFox you might want to use SearchStatus, it’s a great
Little extension that works much better then the original.

Can I really cheat Alexa?
I believe that with the methods explained there you could easily bring your ranking down from Above a million to 100,000 and less, it’s when you aiming to bring it below 10,000 or 1,000 where the trouble begins.
There is no sure way to do this beside Trying and monitoring the results.

Below you’ll find a collection of tips that helped me to get ranked below the 50,000 line within few weeks time:

1. Install the Alexa toolbar; it doesn’t matter if you install it on Explorer or FireFox
As long as you install it you become a vote, now every time you’ll access your site
(With unique ip) you’ll be considered as vote.

2. Put up an Alexa rank widget, every click on it will count as vote and every vote will raise rating.

3. Work in an Office? download Alexa’s Toolbar and install it on all the computers,
Set the browsers homepage to your site.

4. Write or Blog about Alexa, this attracts Alexa’s main audience, Webmasters & Bloggers.

5. Flaunt your URL, add it everywhere you can (don’t spam it), add it on email signatures, forum signatures and comments on other blogs. That way not only you’re likely to attract users with the toolbar installed, you’ll also get feedback about your site and hear how people see it.

6. Use Alexa redirects, emulate the toolbar hits, and place the referral link wherever you can (Blog comments, Signatures, Pay per click campaign, Banner & Link ads)
Just use the following format: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.askreamaor.com

7. Create a webmaster tools section, you can either create something unique or just use any remote hosted services placed on your site (Like PR check) this will attract webmasters to this section and earn you extra votes.

8. Optimize your popular posts, find the must popular posts and edit them to include Alexa’s Widget or link them heavily with alexa’s referral.

9. Create an Alexa category, include any article, post, tool or whatever you do or write relating to Alexa, this will help attracting Webmasters.

10. Pay Cybercafe owners, if you live in a big city there’s good chances that you’ll
Have at list several internet caffes, try to talk with the owner or maybe even pay them some money to download the toolbar and set your site as homepage on all the computers.

11. Use MySpace, this is a nasty trick, but it still might work for you.
Put a weird/sexy/funny picture to your profile and set your URL to with Alexa’s Referral, you should get a lot of clicks from horny users… just remember those are not real visits.

12. Use AutoSurfers, there are so many of them today, they will help you to lower
Your rank to something around 100,000 within few weeks without any problem.

13. The last one, and the best (in my opinion) although this might count as Serious cheating and might earn you one way ticket to hell, this will WORK!
Using this method will do one of the two (or both of them).
- Get you banned from Alexa
- Get you Very high rank.

It’s not as easy as the other methods I’ve wrote about, but if you have other websites
With more traffic (doesn’t matter where, when or how just as long as they are unique visits). This method is very simple. Take a website with a lot of traffic (anything with more then 300 Unique per day would be good, but the more the merrier).
And place an Iframe with your site and alex’as referral. This means that every surfer who gets in your site will automatically vote to your other site, doesn’t matter if they have or don’t have the toolbar installed. This is very unethical but with the money you’ll earn you can buy ethics.

Use something like
<**iframe
src ="http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.glassesadvisor.com" width="1" height="1">
<**/iframe>

(just make sure you remove the ** marks.)
And watch the rating jump.

That’s it for this time,
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