I really hate toolbars.

I say that because I just installed a toolbar (that I should have installed anyway) in both my IE7 and Firefox browsers. Every since I have started blogging, Ive read that the Alexa toolbar is a must for most website/blog owners. Now Im slow to starting some things. I was slow to start paying attention to SEO/Page Rank and Ive definitely dragged my feet on my Alexa ranking.

The reason why this week I started paying attention to my Alexa ranking is that I noticed my ranking over at Jonzee.com had gone waaaaaay down. I mean way down. I dont know what happened. I did have a few slow blog posting months, then I made a mistake and deleted my website altogether for a week or so. But needless to say it went into the millions, with like a 80-ish percent drop in ranking over the last 3 months.

In a rush to try to get my ranking back up a little bit, I installed Alexa toolbar. As you know, the way Alexa get the ranking info is by collecting information from users that have the toolbar installed. So I do visit my blogs from time to time, I might as well have it installed so that I will at least get counted.

Another little tidbit of information that I read about (sorry forgot where I saw it) is to make sure you have one of the Alexa Widgets installed on your website. I usually don’t like to have those widgets that display number unless I have some numbers that are somewhat worth showing. So I put an Alexa Widget on this blog. I figured "now that I have the toolbar and widget installed, I’ll give it a week or so to see if it helps."

Well it didn’t take a week.

24 hours later, my Alexa ranking dropped pretty decently (lower is better, so dropped is an improvement). I don’t know if it had anything to do with me installing the toolbar or not, but there was some progress. On the other hand, I didn’t add the widget to Jonzee.com and my ranking (for the week) has dropped almost back down to where it was before it went up (lower than this site, which makes sense because I get more traffic at Jonzee.com than here).

The odd thing is that even though I had those slow posting months over at Jonzee.com, my traffic was still pretty consistent. still getting more visitors per day than I do here at Jonespc.com, Im thinking that week or so when I lost my website really hurt me.

Whatever the case may be, I feel pretty confident that if you run a website or blog, it is probably a good idea to install the Alexa toolbar, and one of the Alexa Widgets on your site.