Alexa is a blog ranking system among many others.
In a previous post, I talked about the danger of obsessing over rankings and social media stats. Keeping that in mind, if you’re a blogger who advertises on your blog (this fits many of my readers), then you’ll want to know that some advertisers look at your blog’s Alexa score to determine if they are going to advertise with you or not.
For that reason alone, it’s worth exploring the subject.
With over 150 million blogs on the Web today, a blog that has a ranking of less than 100,000 is doing great.
Anything below 50,000 is spectacular.
I’m writing this post for the sake of those of you who want to get your blog’s Alexa score down. And I’m writing from what I’ve discovered from my own experimentation.
In October 2011, my blog was on the free WordPress.com platform. At that time, the blog’s Alexa ranking was 28,347,335.
When I moved over to WordPress.org and put my blog on the Standard Theme, my Alexa score dropped below 1 million.
On February 28, 2012, the blog’s Alexa score was 577,531. Since that time, I’ve done ten things that have caused my score to fall below 100,000.
On June 6, 2012, it broke the 100,000 mark.
At the rate that it’s dropping, the global rank should be well below 50,000 four months from now. But we’ll see.
How I Got My Alexa Ranking Below 100,000
1. If you’re not using the Standard Theme yet, I can’t recommend it enough. See the first point of my Advice for Bloggers post. It has instructions on how to order and install it.
2. Install the Alexa toolbar. You need to use Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer as your browser. I’m not a fan of toolbars, but this one is neat.
3. Register for an Alexa account. It’s easy and free.
5. Install the Alexa widget to your blog.
6. View your blog and all other blogs using the browser where the toolbar is installed. So if you installed it in Chrome, then view all blogs in Chrome. The same for Firefox or Internet Explorer.
7. Write a review for the blogs you like on the Alexa review system and give them high scores. The word on the street is that if you write negative reviews or give low scores, it hurts your blog ranking. So only review the sites and blogs that you like. The more reviews you write, the better.
8. Ask the people who like your blog to write a positive review for it on Alexa.
9. Blog consistently (at least once a week) and write quality content that people want to share. Don’t beg or ask them to share your posts. If what you write is valuable and edifying, people will share your posts naturally.
10. Be patient. The following will you give an idea of the pace by which my Alexa score dropped. I’ve been tracking it once a month since March.
3/6/12 – Alexa global rank = 564,234
4/4/12 – Alexa global rank = 262,700
5/5/12 – Alexa global rank = 135,307
6/6/12 – Alexa global rank = 99,870
7/6/12 – Alexa global rank = 88,092
8/6/12 – Alexa global rank = 87,392
9/6/12 – Alexa global rank = 79,324
10/6/12 – Alexa global rank = 75,133
In closing, I want to give credit to Michelle Shaeffer. Her blog has helped me in this area.
Update: I’m writing this on 11/6/12 and am sorry to announce that I cannot endorse Alexa. Their rating system has major problems. Today, my Alexa ranking is higher than it was one month ago, even though my RSS subscribers, readership, and pageviews have increased. In fact, the blog recently ranked in the top 5 of all Christian blogs on the Web. Yet the Alexa ranking for this blog is higher than many blogs that have less traffic. My ranking went up after I stopped paying for their monthly premium membership. I’ve written to Alexa about this problem, but only received boiler plate responses which didn’t answer the question. Given the statistics from Google Analytics and Awstats, this blog should have an Alexa ranking that is well below 50,000 by now. Consequently, it’s not an accurate system and I cannot recommend it.
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Thank you very much for this wonderful tips, I am still trying to get my blog rank below 100.000
Great job. Its really helpful for new blogger.
The Alexa ranking is worthwhile as a way of making relative comparisons to your “competition”. It is not an absolute traffic ranking since different demographics visit various sites with and without the Alexa Toolbar installed.
A lot of people may visit Apple.com putting their ranking at #50, meanwhile, Conduit.com is ranked higher at #37. Does this mean that Conduit is more popular than Apple? Probably not but because Conduit appeals to the type of individual who would more likely have an Alexa toolbar vs Apple, then it makes it appear that Conduit has more traffic.
So a better way to look at the Alexa number is to compare similar categories as it is more likely that if someone is looking at Apple’s site, they also are looking at Microsoft’s site. Apple sees that MS is getting more Alexa traffic than they are so this might affect their online marketing decisions relative to those in their own industry.
This is even more the case for niche B2B sites. If you have a medical device company selling to hospitals and your Alexa rating sucks compared to your direct competition then you should worry given that the hospital probably does due diligence on their vendors using Alexa. Keep in mind that you are assuming that the same demographic that would visit your site also visits the competition’s site. You don’t really care about the fact that some people have the Toolbar and others don’t. The question is, do the people who DO have the toolbar look at your site before or after they look at your competition’s site.
This is a foundational question. Obviously, it is important to know what kind of prospect or customer an Alexa Toolbar user might be compared to one who doesn’t have the tool bar but this same consideration goes for your competition as well so the ranking at least gives you an idea of where you are in your industry compared to others in that same industry.
The bottom line is, Alexa is a way to see how you fare compared to your direct competition and not to the world as a whole. It doesn’t mean those people are better prospects. That’s a different issue.
Alexa is a way to count the site popularity. It needs to be improved because anyone can influence the results with fake visitors.
If it’s based on a toolbar, why do so many people see it as reliable?
Do you think that because you’ve stopped the premium membership, they’ve somehow lowered your score? That is crazy! (but I believe it). What’s the point of it if you have to pay to influence it?
great, this will may help me to improve my blog.
doing well with alexa too, hope to get to under 100k in two months am currently in 300k
Great Post! i was looking for this, and definitely will implement on my website and blog..
Thanks.
Great post thank for sharing.
thank you so much.
That is awesome advice. I’ve been looking for ways to get my Alexa ranking way down so that I can start selling ad space. Thanks for the tips!
Reese
Great information, Frank. I look forward to hearing more ways to improve on the Alexa, and any other tools to get site traffic and indexing.
Don’t forget the traffic is measured only because a few people have the Alexa toolbar installed. This is the only way for Alexa to measure traffic for a site so don’t be sad when your site is not <100,000 since it's not accurate anyways.
3 weeks ago my alesa ranking was 12 million plus and yesterday was 1.7 million
I received 800 to 1500 unique visitors a day ffrom search engine and advertising campaign.
Well I hope to hit below 100k mark in 3 months. And the best part is my domain is less than a month old
Alexa gets rankings solely based on what people with the alexa toolbar are viewing. That is how they get their data. That means you want your readers to have the toolbar.
http://mattdabbs.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/how-accurate-is-alexa-stats-dont-lie/
See comment #7 where someone from alexa gave some explanation of their system.
That’s excellent. I use Alexa, but haven’t reviewed many Alexa blogs. I just installed the badge, and am sitting at just over 500,000.
It helps to leave comments on other niche sites that also are interested in low Alexa rankings. Other bloggers and tech sites. Only viewers who have the toolbar installed and visit your site count toward your Alexa ranking. I’m hovering around 177K as of mid June 12.
Thanks for adding that great tip.
wow! you’ve been doing great as well in terms of writing and engagement! that matters as well!
Thanks for supporting Standard Theme! v3.0 is coming out sooooon!
Standard Theme fo Life, yo.