How To Lower Your Alexa Rank

I have been doing a lot of reading about Alexa rank lately, and I was curious how I might be able to lower my Alexa ranking. While most webmasters would probably agree that the Alexa ranking is not very accurate, it does play a role in how some websites are valued. A good example is Text Link Ads, where Alexa rank helps to determine the price for selling links from your site.

As an experiment to see if I could lower the Alexa rank of three separate websites I added an Alexa widget to each site and recorded the Alexa rank from August 8, 2007 for one site and from August 23, 2007 for two other sites. Below is the data for the three sites.

DateWebsite 1Website 2Website 3
8/8/2007556,017
8/15/2007473,705
8/20/2007445,224
8/23/2007423,651643,3531,733,470
8/28/2007401,288670,6211,736,471
8/29/2007392,310650,3061,647,715
9/2/2007392,128644,2071,646,994
9/7/2007378,928612,2531,519,212
9/10/2007378,928608,8571,442,110
9/12/2007354,528566,8421,441,124
9/22/2007344,909566,8421,441,124
9/24/2007342,354554,2821,351,596
9/27/2007343,567529,5551,281,987
10/2/2007349,609519,6121,152,594
Drop in Alexa Rank-206,408-123,741-580,876

alexa_ranking.gif

Overall there was a decrease in the Alexa ranking by adding the Alexa widget to the sites. While I dislike adding additional items to websites that will slow down a page load, placing an Alexa widget on your site might be worth considering if you are thinking of selling direct advertising or other text link sales. With a little clever CSS and HTML the visitor does not even need to know the Alexa widget is there, yet the visit will be counted by Alexa.

I am going to keep the Alexa widget on the three sites until Christmas and see if the sites Alexa ranking continues to slowly drop. One of the sites is fairly new, launching only in June 2007, so it might gain more traffic by December and drop more significantly.

Categories: marketing