Earlier this month I wrote an article about using Alexa Re-directs to help improve your Alexa rankings, following this post I was told that these redirects do not work and I was wasting my time and loosing potential Link Juice. I wasn't to sure what to think after learning this as I had visited several sites which descibed how to implement the Alexa Redirect before compiling the post and took it for granted that all of them coundnt be wrong, could they? Possibly?
Testing
Following this I decided to do a little research of my own, I have two other sites which haven't been "logged" by Alexa which were perfect subjects for this experiment. So on the 4th of June I decided to start my study, my fist site EuroLotteryWinner I accessed through the alexa redirect using my Firefox browser for the following 9 days, my other site The Residual Income Project I accessed each day using Internet Explorer with the Alexa toolbar installed. This was based on the understanding that Alexa would recognize the 1 unique hit each day for both of the sites and if the redirects work both results "should be identical".
The results are quite strange indeed, my Triproject website has registered no hits at all Using the Alexa toolbar but my EuroLottery site has seen the rankings improve. This experiment relied on both websites not getting any hits during the testing period (which was true, as up untill the second of June they were both poor performers!) What Ionly found out a couple of days ago was that my EuroLottery website has made it into Number 2 ranking on yahoo for the search term "euro lottery". This has made the experiment unfair so I cant say wheather redirects work or not, what is strange is that using the toolbar made no difference to my Triproject websites rankings.
So, Do redirects work or not?
I cant possibly say that redirects work or not, I have tried to contact Alexa and have trawled the web to try and find the conclusive answer but still it eludes me! There are MANY MANY blog articles saying that redirects do work but here is no evidence to suport this, I guess using redirects in very slight moderation cant hurt but using non-redirected links is much better for the performance of your site!
If you want to find out more check out Daves blog at Red Fly Marketing
If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!
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I don't use the redirect but I use the toolbar(Firefox/IE) and the widget on my sites. I did notice a very big jump in my ranking after a few weeks times. You may want to try that.
Improving your site ranking on Alexa
Hi Steve, thanks, Im going to add the widget to my site in the next week.
Andy
Hi Andy, I got the information about Alexa Redirect from you and tried it out on three of my blogs… I think it definitely works. One was a brand new one and already showed up on Alexa Ranking within a week. My other one went from 1,800,000 to 1,400,000. The third one wasn't even on Alexa and now is… So I do think it works. I have been putting it everywhere though. On comments, blog directories any chance I get. I hope this helps.
Andy,
I too try some experiment on Alexa redirects and was inconclusive as well. I had a jump on Alexa ranking but that could be mainly due to my increase in traffic from the ViralTags post.
There are so many conflicting arguments out there. It's like opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and they all stink
Yeah its hard without a definite answer to work out if your wasting your time with redirects. Though i do find it hard to believe that Alexa came up with a redirect protocol which does nothing?! At the end of the day it's a free gamble, if you use it sparingly you have nothing to loose!
Andy
A better option is to make the Alexa redirecting JavaScript-powered: in this way the HTML will not be modified, and the redirects will still work. I’ve applied this technique to a new plugin called Better “Alexa Redirect” WordPress plugin. If you are interested about it, visit this URL to learn more about it:
http://kaloyan.info/blog/better-alexa-redirect-plugin/
or visit this page to download it:
http://wp-alexa-redirect.googlecode.com/