Good news for lots of bloggers this week, we are all about to get a massive boost in our (totally meaningless) Alexa Rankings.
The reason for this boost is that Alexa have just released a Firefox version of their toolbar called Sparky. Previously the toolbar was only available for IE which meant that only people so determined to boost their rank that they would use IE could use it.
Now there is a version for Firefox there will be thousands of webmasters installing the toolbar and we will all get sub 10,000 rankings.
Obviously this won’t mean anything but its nice to know the reason your rankings suddenly changed.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
People still use that chunk of spyware for IE? Ick.
Sweet! But what about the SearchStatus extension for Firefox… it includes an Alexa rank feature, but does it actually count for Alexa pageviews?
If it did, maybe that plus Sparky will really help our Alexa ranks!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but at most 9,999 sites will have sub-10k ranking.
i’m not sure any of us will see a major change, infact it’s even possible that must of us wont see ANY chance.
it’s not that YOU (or any of us) will get more visitors with Alexa tool bar, it’s EVERYONE will get more visitors, so indeed you have more valid visits, but the userbase itself grows Network wide.
Alexa ranking is nothing.
Get high PR and sell the links
I use a nice little add on called search status to help me with my seo. I have it installed instead of the google toolbar. Search status has some nice features including a google page rank, alexa rank, and a bunch of other tools. Check it out http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/. Be careful though because it does affect Alexa. I’ve had a couple sites get prematurely indexed because I forgot about this.
Finally, the long awaited Alexa Toolbar for Firefox is here. Lots of Alexa freaks were looking forward to it
Do you think it will make that much difference? I know some niches might jump higher then others in general. But technically any site will see an increase and if all see an increase then doesnt that mean we will stay the same?
Well, it will help where there are websites with substantially larger web savvy FF user base. It would mean that some blogs that were not getting recognised on alexa because their specific target audience didnt trust alexa because of the security alert when installing on IE.
Maybe…
Hi,
In blogstorm at the end of every post you have links to submit the post to social bookmarking sites like digg, stumbleupon etc. Do you know anyway to put them at the end of each post in a blogspot blog?
I’m not sure so many people will install it.
Alexa is a scam
Where are you people live?! SearchStatus exist for long, long time. What web developers are you since you don’t use it?!
Also, anyone can make miscellaneous toolbars for IE and Firefox that will count hits to Alexa. I saw tens of them.
Well alexa ranking is important if you buy and sell websites, domains, etc… it has it’s importance to the people that know how to use it in their benefit
Alexa rankings are not very reliable…
The alexa toolbar has been available a long time through the searchstatus addon. It does affect you alexa rank so this is really nothing new.
I saw your comment on SiteWriters Blog asking for a trick to add Seperate bookmarking icons below your blog post(like you have in this blog).Now its possible in Blogspot too using a little trick.I have implemented it in my simple blog.Read about the trick and plz do comment at my Simple Tricks blog
Intrested, but I used Google Chrome.
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