I have been asked my more than one of my friends about improving alexa ranks. I do not a rank i can boast about, but still its not bad too.

Anyway, on the job, alexa is one more of a measuring factor, in the lines of pagerank and technorati rankings. It is really a head ache to manage one more rating system, but this one is easy. Alexa updates its ratings very often and so you can really see results on the move.

1. Download the alexa toolbar. Good news is that there is one for firefox too. But let it trouble you by its presence. You can hide the menu from the toolbar and the graph from the status bar, so that only the rank stays alive. I suggest you to leave this open, beacuse you can also use this is a phishing measure.

Assume, you get a mail from paypal (or atleast you thought so, it was from paypal) when you open the new link, the alexa ranking of the site is not going to a three digit number. So you get that the site is a fake one.

2. Alexa redirect really works wonders. (it did do really well for me). I would not suggest this to everyone, beacuse it has got its other sides. The trick is to use a link as a redirect, look below for more. You have to use the second link, instead of the first in all your links in the pages. You may benefit, if user clicks many times in your site. You should put redirect before archieves , top posts, and almost everything.

<a href=”http://yourblog.blogspot.com”> new post </a>

<a href=”http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://yourblog.blogspot.com”> some link</a>

Warning : This does improve your alexa ranking, but may have other side effects from google bot. When the bot crawls your page, it sees the link is to the alexa page and not your own site. Remember your side is passed as a parameter to the alexa redirect site. I strongly suggest to investigate, before using alexa redirect. Hence the bot may fail to see your internal links and may not cache them. Even if it caches them, they are not tagged to your site. Here is a small guide to make things better.

3. Download the alexa gadget. this stats your rank and other details of your alexa ranking. The best thing about this widget is that alexa promises that a alexa count is made every time a user (you included ) clicks on this widget. This works on a 24 basis.

4. If you have a website, you must also submit your details to alexa. This would need a email with the same name as the website. Blogspot users cannot do this.

Hope this helps. If you can benefit by improving your alexa rank, please do let me know at least by a comment. I would greatly appreciate if you can link this article in your blog.

Just thought i must add this to this post. How does alexa redirect to your page, when passed a web page as a parameter.

There are two methods to do this on the client side. There is one more on the server side.

In JSP:

The request Dispatcher object takes a resource as a parameter and can be used to include or forward the control to this resource. However this is a server side opertaion. User will not be aware of this.

RequestDispatcher rd = response.getRequestDispatcher (”http://codeinsane.com”) ;
rd.forward (req, res) ;

The client side redirect works like as shown below.

response.sendRedirect (”http://codeinsane.com”) ;

The client is aware of this redirect, when used as in the above case. There is also another method, which involves setting of the header and sending it back tot he client.

response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_TEMPORARY_REDIRECT);
response.setHeader(”Location”, “http://codeinsane.com”);

There are similar response redirects in PHP, which can be achieved as

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://codeinsane.com’ ) ;
?>