CAVSI - Technical Questions & Answers

Alexa auto surf may work for new sites with extremely low Alexa ranking and no page rank. Using any auto-surfing is considered a black hat technique and penalized by search engines like Google, especially if you are showing AdSense ads on the site.

If you notice, many of the websites that offer auto-surf services have little or no page rank. If you check its Alexa ranking you will see that it is over 1.000.000. So, do you believe this could help your website?...

There are two effortless ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar.

If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, and Google PageRank as well as other useful features....

Some webmasters ensure that using a widget helps improve your Alexa rank because it would load with each page view and no matter whether your visitors have the toolbar/plugin installed or not. A widget would supply traffic data for Alexa to calculate your ranking.

Other webmasters say that widget does not help to rank. In fact, the Alexa website itself says traffic rankings come from the toolbar and never mentions the widget as a source of information. There are many bloggers and website authors who dispute this information....

The Alexa Toolbar is an application produced by Alexa Internet, is a Browser Helper Object for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows that is used by Alexa to measure website statistics. It includes a popup blocker, a search engine entry box, a link to Amazon.com, a link to Alexa, information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that the user is visiting, and links relevant to the site the user is browsing. By early 2005 there had been over 10 million downloads of the toolbar, according to Alexa. But the company does not provide info on how many of them are used. According to one estimate made in March 2003, Alexa had a sample size of 180,000.

There are some privacy concerns about the toolbar, as it requests site data from Alexa and there is no information on how long Alexa stores these usage trails. Because of this, many anti-spyware programs label it as such. Though it is usually installed willingly, third parties sometimes distribute the toolbar or access Alexa’s API....

Alexa ranking is not accurate and can be manipulated. Alexa data is based on a statistical sample consisting of website users who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa provides reach rank data for the day, previous week, and previous three months.

Alexa does not provide information about their total population of toolbar users, but an analysis of Alexa data reveals this information by other means. Many Alexa users are webmasters and marketing junkies. They install it on their own systems, and their own heavy use of their own pages causes their Alexa page rank to rise....

Alexa tracks a website’s traffic history and gives a ranking based on the number of visitors using the Alexa toolbar. We all know that Alexa ranking lacks in accuracy, but Alexa rank is important because:

There are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa rankings seriously, and many “money-maker programs” still count on this to determine how popular our site is. If you want to sell ad space on your website through services like Text-Link-Ads, you need better Alexa Ranking and Google PR....

There are several disadvantages of Alexa ranking. is that depend on the Alexa toolbar?

Not everybody has the Alexa toolbar installed, so there might be millions of Web sites that, even if they have a lot of traffic, will not be ranked (or not high enough) by Alexa. It is rather relative....

If your website has a good Alexa ranking, this means that you can increase your sales by having a popular website that can be compared with its competitors. As opposed to Google’s PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.

Increase your sales. It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way. The better your Alexa ranks, the higher they may be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site. The website that had the lowest Alexa rank consistently can sell more products....

The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. The power of the Alexa ranking is your ability to tell if someone is telling the truth about their traffic levels, whether it’s good to purchase advertising space on a website and you want to see if they are really getting the unique hits they say they are. Alexa is also useful in rating one site compared to another, but the ranking can’t tell you much beyond that.

Ratings are based on a level from 1 to 4,000,000 and it goes beyond 4 mils sometimes. The LOWER your rating on Alexa the better. Meaning if you have a ranking under 100,000 then your website should be producing some good traffic. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic basically....

Alexa rank depends on whether your visitors have the Alexa toolbar installed. This excludes traffic received from visitors that do not use their toolbar. Your website could have some thousand visitors a day, but if none have the Alexa toolbar, those visits do not improve your Alexa ranking, it counts as zero visitors.

In order to boost your ranking you can download the Alexa toolbar and use it every day to visit your own website. You can download the toolbar here: Alexa toobar...

There are some tips you can use to boost your Alexa Rank:...

Alexa Internet is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com. Alexa operates the website “alexa.com” which provides information on the web traffic to other websites.

This information is collected through the Alexa toolbar. When users download the toolbar and use it to navigate to a particular site, Alexa collects this data for its page rank calculation....