Useless Ways to Juice Your Alexa Rank.

There are lots of ineffective ways to increase your Alexa, Google or Technorati rank. One of the worst is this: Hop on a link train when there are more than 10 people already on the train.

Seriously.

What’s link train, you ask? Well, a link train is a sort of the blog equivalent of a chain letter. We can see how they typically work by examining the “Alexa Redirect Train” described at The Pay Per Post Forum and then generalizing.

Here’s what happens:

1. Someone dreams up an idea for a train and announces it.

2. That person thinks up a list of rules for the link train, and writes them up, invites you to join the train and post about it- being sure to copy the rules.

I edited the list of rules on the PayPerPost site to create a typical list of rules. I’ve also inserted my comments in italics. Here goes, typical rules:

~Start Copying Here~”

“Some type” of Train by “Person who thought of it”.

Rules:

1. Put some text above the train to introduce what this is. (The purpose of this rule is to trick the spiders into thinking this is unique content. ‘Cuz you can see there is going to be a whole lot of copying goin’ on!)
2. Start copying on the “~Start Copying Here~” and copy all the things listed without removing the links. ( Note: The purpose of the links list is to make sure everyone who jumped on the train early gets a link. Those who jumped on later? Well….)
3. Move all the sites labeled “Newcomers” to the list labeled “Oldies”.
4. Add 5 sites that you want to include in the train and make their link like this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.example.com then invite them to join the train. (These are the people you are going to try to invite to join. If they join, and get other to join and so on, you might eventually benefit from the link train. Notice that the first person on the list never drops off the list? Well. . . )
5. Visit all the listed sites! (By the time I saw this on the PayPerPost forum, there are 26 sites I’d never heard of on that list. I’m supposed to click and visit them all? Regularly? Ackk!!!! )

New Comers
List of 5 blogs.

Old Timers: (A long list of blogs.)
Blog M, Blog L, Blog K, Blog J, Blog I, Blog H, Blog G, Blog F, Blog E, Blog D, Blog C, Blog B, Blog A(The blogger who started the linktrain.)

~End Copying Here~”

Ok. Those were the generic rules.

Say you came across this invitation, as I did, and there were already 26 blogs on the list. Let’s think about why this is a bad deal for me, a link whoring, traffic grappling an ambitious blogger.

Blog A started the list. He added 5 bloggers B-F, who we wi