One problem many people are begining to face is that of Alexa. Alexa is not exactly the problem itself, the problem is that many advertisers will look at your Alexa rating and make a judgement based on it.

The problem with Alexa is that it only tracks information gathered from people who use the Alexa toolbar with Internet Explorer.

Most of my traffic comes from people who use FireFox. These hits will never be counted by Alexa, or will they?

If you look at the traffic details for hmtk.com You will see one huge spike in the beginning followed by a shorter spike. These are the result of my blog being 'dugg'. My 3 month average has been hovering about 225K and you can see that my traffic is fairly steady.

My traffic is not earth-shattering but it is steady and you would think an advertiser would like steady traffic rather than tall peaks and low valleys. Sadly, they look at the Alexa ranking (225K) and that is all they see.

Also, this blog is Page Rank 5 according to Google. Google must know something Alexa does not?

I would also like to cast your eyes on this:

The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. Known biases include (but are likely not limited to) the following:

  • Our users are disproportionately likely to visit sites that are featured on alexa.com such as amazon.com and archive.org, and traffic to these sites may be overcounted.
  • The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of the various browsers is unknown. Alexa's sample includes users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla browsers. The AOL/Netscape and Opera browser is not supported, which means that sites operated by these companies may be undercounted.
  • The extent to which our sample may overcount or undercount users of various operating systems is unknown. Alexa sample includes toolbars built for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
    The rate of adoption of Alexa software in different parts of the world may vary widely due to advertising locality, language, and other geographic and cultural factors. For example, to some extent the prominence of Chinese sites among our top-ranked sites reflects known high rates of general Internet usage in China, but there may also be a disproportionate number of Chinese Alexa users.

  • In some cases traffic data may also be adversely affected by our "site" definitions. With tens of millions of hosts on the Internet, our automated procedures for determining which hosts are serving the "same" content may be incorrect and/or out-of-date. Similarly, the determinations of domains and home pages may not always be accurate. When these determinations change (as they do periodically), there may be sudden artificial changes in the Alexa traffic rankings for some sites as a consequence.
  • The Alexa Toolbar turns itself off on secure pages (https:). Sites with secure page views will be under-represented in the Alexa traffic data.

    • Source - Alexa Disclaimer

    You might be begining to wonder what this has to do with the title of this post. Fear not for I will now tell you how to make Alexa like you.

    If someone does not have the Alexa toolbar installed there is still a way to make the hits on your site count by using a redirect.

    http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.hmtk.com/

    If you create a link to your site with the above redirect code the visit will be counted by Alexa. It will not, however, be counted by Google when figuring page rank.

    So, which do you want? A better Google Page Rank or a better Alexa rating?

    UPDATE: After running this for a little over two months (and some nefarious versions of it) I have come to the conclussion that this is no way helps you. Just going to your own site from three different Alexa enabled computers (or changing your dynamic IP address often) gives you far more benefit than this does.

    If you want to help me increase my Alexa rating click this link -> HMTK.com deserves a better Alexa rating