I know this sounds unbelievable, but about a week or so ago I stumbled onto something that may have helped do all 3 of those things. The best thing of all is that it was completely unintentional.

  • I wasn’t trying.
  • It wasn’t done on purpose.
  • It wasn’t a Hack.

Before I go on, I have to admit that this thing hasn’t done all of these things as of yet. Its still too soon to tell.

What was it that may have boosted my Alexa rank, Traffic, and Page rank?

Well I wrote a little blog post called  "Does the Alexa toolbar and Widget help your Alexa ranking?", where I talked about how my Alexa ranking had dropped off, and I decided to try 2 of the rumors I read before to see if it made a difference in my Alexa ranking. I installed the Alexa toolbar, and I installed the Alexa widget on one of my blogs. I then watched my ranking over the next couple of weeks to see if there was a difference. No big deal, just one of those topics that has probably been blogged about by millions of bloggers over the years.

Thats it. Thats all I did.

So how did that help anything? Writing a blog post on a popular topic? What made my blog post so special. The truth is, I don’t know. I think it was probably interesting to read, but nothing special.

Alexa-Calling-Me-OutA few days after that blog post, I was checking my stats and noticed a linkback from another blogpost talking about Alexa ranking. I went to read that blog post and noticed I was pretty much lumped together with other websites that the author thought were pretty much abusers of the system. That blog was an official Alexa blog, the author was Gregory Mack, product manager for Alexa. First of all I was pretty flattered. I got linked to by "someone that matters", on a blog with a Page Rank of 8. The bad thing about it was that my blog post was taken out of context, I’m guessing for the sake of Mr Mack’s blog post (shame on you Mr Mack). I didn’t get mad, I just left a few comments, first of all thanking him for linking to me, then briefly explaining that the blog post he linked to wasn’t really talking about what he was inferring (I don’t think he actually read my post).  No biggie, it was over, I forgot about it.

Every since then Ive been getting traffic from that Alexa blog post linking to me, not a whole lot, but enough to were it is noticeable, and pretty much consistent. I cant complain about that. a little traffic, some potential PR from a PR8 blog, and potential Alexa Rank help since you can probably guess that most people that would read an Alexa official blog is probably using the Toolbar.

Alexa-Calling-Me-out

Not only that, now Ive been linked to by another blog talking about the same blog post. Again lumped together and labeled as an Alexa abuser, but in a more diplomatic way.

I’m greatful for both of those links and the little traffic Im getting, and again, I am completely flattered. But please could you read my blog post and the followup post? I’m not an Alexa abuser.