Alexa ranking is something that some people judge their very existance by. They’re not concerned that their family is safe and secure around them, not that they’re in good health, or even take delight in how many friends they have close by. But how important Alexa tells them they to the Internet community – how much the Internet loves them.
They live and die by the rises and falls of their Alexa ranking.
It’s sad, but it’s true.
This leads to the perpetuation of Alexa-ranking watching, and feverish downloading of the Alexa Toolbar on to all and any machines that might be used.
You see, the way that Alexa finds out which Web sites are being visited, is by watching which sites are visited by people who have installed the Alexa Toolbar and reporting this information back to Alexa. Thus the virtuous circle is completed and the Alexa ranking created.
There are flaw with this method of judgement. The most fundamental being that the official Alexa toolbar is only available to run on Windows machines running ie6 and above.
Ramping the Ranking
Many have postulated that a site’s Alexa ranking can be manipulated simply by getting the world and his wife/partner to install the Alex toolbar on their machine and browser to the target site.
It’s understood that within certain Venture Capital firms employees being instructed to visit their client sites in an attempt to boost their Alexa ranking. Not doing so will lower the value of their investment.
We’ve even hear of people setting up farms of PC’s equipped with Alexa-plugedin Browsers automatically refreshing access to the target web site, again to pushing the ranking up.
The Challenge
We though it would be an interesting test to see if we and you, can affect the Alexa Ranking of Digital-Lifestyles.
If you’re up for a bit of unscientific fun, read on.
If you’re an Internet Explorer user, download the Alexa toolbar. Firefox users might get some joy from here. User of other browsers are going to miss out on the fun.
When it’s loaded, pop over to the Digital-Lifestyles site even more frequently than you normally do and let’s see what change we can make to our current 71,247 ranking.
Come on, it’ll be fun.