Directory Spy

I’ve been noticing that Alexa rankings have been growing in popularity as ways to rate a directory for traffic. Google Page Rank is a metric that relates to inbound and outbound link counts. Alexa rankings are heavily biased on visitors who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. Therefore if you are selling advertising space based on traffic, having a low Alexa ranking (i.e. loads of traffic), then this will help you to command a good price.

There are many ways to increase your Alexa rank, such as displaying the Alexa widget on your directory such as the one below. Apparently if a visitor clicks on this widget, it counts as traffic to your site even if they don’t have a toolbar.

Using the Alexa redirection (e.g. http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.directoryspy.com) will count a single ip address as a visitor. If you use this for older posts, and possible for internal linking, then you can quickly increase your ranking with very little effort. For internal linking, you’d probably want to use some code to do the hard work for you.

Another tip is to use the traffic auto-surf exchange type systems. I imagine most are dodgy, but I’ve been researching UpMyRank for a while now, and it’s already working to boost one of my websites (not Directory Spy). Any script that runs from a single ip address is a sure fire way to getting banned. UpMyRank is almost a peer to peer traffic exchange. It’s definitely worth giving them a shot.

For a few more tips, I’ve found this fantastic article on DoshDosh with 20 quick ways to increase your Alexa rank.