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Psst… Alexa Rank Secret Revealed!

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

Today, I will reveal the real secret of getting a great Alexa rank. I discovered when I found scrapers sites in my inbound links!

Mind you, no one is scraping my blog; they are scraping “How to Boost Your Alexa Rank”, published at “Alexa: Web Discover Machine “, a blog written by a couple of fellows who work for Alexa and discuss nothing but Alexa.

That post linked Skyrocket Alexa and that link now appears at a quality blog that looks like this:

Maybe I should email that blogger and ask him which affiliate programs he uses? Cause’ I bet I could make money with a big Skype ad too!

Now for the secret to boosting Alexa!

Now, I’m pretty sure almost no one would intentionally visit that blog. But, I noticed the scraped blog has an Alexa rank of 265,915.

Many bloggers running sponsored posts would love that type of rank.

How did the scraper site achieve that? Well, here’s my theory:

See that gal wearing the red cape? I know she’s got an Alexa toolbar installed. And the Asian guy in the black turtleneck? I bet he has an Alexa toobar installed. Heck, I bet everyone of those visitors have toolbars installed!

I suspect the real secret to boosting your Alexa rank: Scrape blogs with good Alexa ranks.

Heck, you probably don’t need to scrape them. Just link ‘em regularly. Their Alexa toolbar totin’ authors will stop by and give your Alexa a nice bump.

Posted in Alexa, Links | 1 Comment »

Being Greedy at Dofollow Blogs Will Hurt You.

Monday, July 30th, 2007

If you are a spammer, spammers don’t really read blog posts. Still, if you came from a dofollow list, it’s possible you have become a bit to eager to gain SEO and are now wasting your time by leaving borderline spammy comments at Dofollow blogs. I’m writing this to help you leave the type of comments that can help your SEO!

What are Borderline Spammy Habits?

We all recognize out and out spam. The comment text contains several links to sites that are irrelevant to the post or blog, and the links contain SEO terms. The “name” is an SEO term. The actual comment text is irrelevant. In truly skanky spam, the links point to porn, pharmaceutical, mortgages or gambling sites.

But every blogger knows, spam is spam even if it points to cooking sites.

We all recognize comments that aren’t at all spammy. These comments provide an honest to goodness name or non-SEO term nickname in the name field which can be associated with the commenter’s blog or site. The links in comment text point to destinations that are specifically relevant to the conversational thread. The visitor did not drop links to their many, multiple blogs and web sites in the comment text.

Finally, the comment text fits the conversational thread.

So what’s borderline spam? Not suprisingly, it’s a comment that contains some valuable content but also shares some of the traits seen in full-blown spam! Non-conversational links in text? SEO names in the name field? We do-followers are seeing an explosion of this!

As a visitor, you might think: “Well, I left valuable commentary. This blog follows. I guess I deserve to refine my SEO by inserting a good SEO term in the name field and adding a desirable anchor text to my link in comments. Also, I want to leave a second singature link in the comment so I can get extra clicks.”

You also think: I’m just being smart and maximizing the return on the three minutes I spent writing this four sentence comment!

Well, you are not being smart; you are hurting yourself!

Leaving Borderline Spammy Comments Hurts You

Here’s how leaving borderline spammy comment hurts you: If you leave borderline spammy comments you will be reported to Akismet by someone. (more…)

Posted in Blogging, DoFollow, Links | 36 Comments »

The John Chow Effect: Does it kill young blogs?

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

Are you a fresh new blogger who has wondered whether you could kick start your blog by paying John Chow to review you? Based on the history of two blogs he reviewed in December 2006 and February 2007 — which died- I’d advise against it.

Both Pubincome.com and Allenation.com, now dead, were reviewed by John Chow. Below, you’ll find a plot showing Alexa estimates of their traffic reach. For comparison purposes, I also show my new blog, “BigBucksBlogger”.¹

Here are the plots:

The Blog Kill Effect?

In late December of ’06, Jason Rodriguez paid John Chow to review the very new pubincome.com. In early January, Jason posted that the review brought his blog a lot of traffic; by March 23, Jason had taken his blog off line.

PubIncome is now dead. May it rest in peace.

On February 7, Allen paid John to review his new blog “Allenation.” In the Alexa graph, you can see Allen’s traffic had increased during the month before the review and then increased more rapidly around Feb. 7 when the review occurred.

At one point, the “reach” noted by Alexa exceeded that of BigBucksBlogger! Imagine getting more than 47 unique visits a day! And without even discussing a topic that really draws in traffic — like knitting!

In the short run, it’s clear Allen was happy with the results and reported a spike in traffic. But, alas, Allen’s traffic dropped precipitously, and for some reason, Allen pretty much stopped posting at Allenation in March 2007. You can read more at Allenation.

Allenation is now dead: May it rest in peace.

Final Analysis

I tried to find other new blogs John Chow may have reviewed more than 3 months ago, but I didn’t find any. If you are aware of any, let me know. I’d love to look at the Alexa plots for those.

Still, based on the results I’ve found, I would advise new bloggers to resist the temptation to buy a ReviewMe by John Chow. The sudden drop after the thrilling rise may kill your blog.

Concentrate on other things- like building good content.

Endnotes:
1. Bear in three things in mind when interpreting the Alexa plot: 1) according to site meter, BigBucksBlogger currently averages 47 unique visits and 91 page views a day, 2) Alexa is a pathetically inaccurate tool but 3) all three blogs are in the “make money niche” which means we can expect our blog visitors to have Alexa toolbars installed.

Posted in Alexa, JohnChow, Link Building, Links, Rankings, Traffic | 5 Comments »

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