Since the beginning of January, Alexa Redirect links have been deprecated and no longer function. They work as a prevention to get to your site.

It used to be possible to inject your link with a forced redirect from alexa: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://liquidparallax.com would tell Alexa someone is going to my homepage. It was debated whether this would send info to your rank. In any case it could harm your Google Page Rank and make links inaccessible when the redirect is down or is broken, which has happened.

There is plenty of talk on how to increase your score. And along with it all is bad advice or misinformed instruction. Another myth: installing the website widget has no standing on your numbers unless one of your site visitors decides to use the toolbar as a result of being curios about your widget.

There is no way to increase your Alexa Rank beyond what your site is capable of performing. You can boost your site’s traffic rank for Alexa if you actually have traffic. A rank of 1 means you have the most traffic that has been monitored by Alexa (right now it’s Yahoo.com). Each number is a position, and you can’t get any higher without having Alexa users visit your site more often than those ahead of you. There are probably billions of domains out there, and it will only get harder to maintain low numbers as the internet expands. And if you just start getting involved you can get noticed by Alexa.

What to really do

  1. Install Alexa status for your browser. A non-invasive solution would be to install firefox add-on SearchStatus, which takes up less space than a tab, and can rest in your status bar. For Internet Explorer or for Alexa’s very own browser display, download it from the source. This is the only way to contribute to Alexa’s traffic directly- by being a user.
  2. Make sure visitors of your site are users of Alexa by following the above download.
  3. Have quality pages; don’t just focus on your main page. Instead of having one page get a ton of hits, make all of your pages worthy of being popular. Unique pages count as part of your rank. So instead of Visitor A going your homepage, Visitor A could visit all of your pages, which would be more helpful with your rank. Refreshing pages does nothing, so don’t give your bandwidth a workout by having your readers boost your traffic hits. Visits are read on a daily basis, so there is a potential for 365 views by the same person of the same page. In addition to Page Views, Reach is counted as part of the formula for your rank. So your best bet is to have a wide audience instead of a few close friends go to your website.

These facts are all you need, and they are what count. Don’t believe anything else except what comes from the source.

A technical way of utilizing all this knowledge would be to set up an automated browser script to visit random pages of a domain within a day [Not that I want to do this for this purpose, but does anyone know of a freeware program that could easily cycle through pages within a domain]. Having multiple Alexa-persons using the script on your domain would yield good results on an emerging site or an unadvertised site. Better yet would be to have legitimate content and quality material that would bring repeated visits from actual readers.