Improving your Alexa ranking

Alexa ranks sites based on visits from users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer, so if your blog visitors don't have the Alexa Toolbar installed, your site wouldn't rank well for Alexa. According to Brett of Using Alexa redirect in your comments, you can improve your Alexa ranking by putting http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your site's URL (Brett was referring to links in comments, but if you don't have the habit of making links to posts (however, see note below) in your other blogs open in new window, you should be able to use the same trick by doing the same thing for links in posts to improve your Alexa ranking, especially if you link to posts in your own blogs like I often do). Each click on the link will be counted by Alexa irrespective of whether the visitor has the Alexa toolbar installed.

To explain further, I will put a link to one of my post in this blog below:

DMOZ, the most important directory and the hardest to get listed in, and Blogger Tips and Tricks got listed even without submitting (by the way, there is also a link to a site which have tips on how to submit your site to DMOZ). I will put the HTML for the above link in the scroll box below:

<a href="http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?blogger-tricks.blogspot.com/2007/04/dmoz-most-important-directory-blogger.html">DMOZ, the most important directory and the hardest to get listed in, and Blogger Tips and Tricks got listed even without submitting</a>

However, don't try to make the link open in new window by adding a target="_blank" attibute because the link gets displayed as "External link". To demonstrate, I will make the same link as above, but with the target="_blank" added below:

DMOZ, the most important directory and the hardest to get listed in, and Blogger Tips and Tricks got listed even without submitting

Note: I had earlier made a test in a test blog and Blogger displayed the link as "External link" and not only that, the HTML was changed and the link opened in the same window. See

Testing Alexa redirect and

Testing Alexa redirect opening in new window.

I had done the same thing as above, and Blogger changed HTML for the link in the second test to

<a href="http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com" rel="external">external link</a>

I don't know why I can add the target="_blank" attribute and get a different result in this post. If this behavior is consistent, looks like you can make links in posts open in new windows and still use the same trick. I will try it when I make new posts and see if I get the same result. If you use this trick in your posts, I hope you will let us know your experience by leaving a comment in this post.

Anyway, it will make no difference if you do this in comments as target="_blank" is not allowed in comments. And anyone clicking on the link in the comment will contribute to improving your Alexa ranking.

BTW if you don't already know it, the lower the Alexa ranking, the better it is for your site, just the opposite from PageRank.

Note: I have made a few more links with this trick and included the target="_blank" and there were no problem. The link displayed as it should and also opened in new windows. However, if you use this trick, do check and ensure it is working as it should, and if it doesn't, please do leave a comment in the interest of all bloggers.