DeeMo

Back at the turn of the Century when I was at Uni, I used to make a little money on the side building very niche and cheap looking websites and selling advertising space to small agencies on them. Back then the only thing anybody seemed to care about when you tried to sell some space was you Alexa traffic ranking, and it was very easy to manipulate the ranking, we would just encourage lots of our site visitors to install the Alexa toolbar and you would soon see your site's ranking jump.

I haven't been selling space for a long time, but as I sit here sort of watching the Steven Seagal movie "above the law" something else I once thought was cool I'm wondering if the Alexa toolbar still has any use to webdesigners and others who just want to get their sites noticed.

After surfing the web and finding very little out there in the way of substantive argument either for or against the toolbar I decided just to download it and see how it works these days. And if it can add any value to either a web surfer or a web designer.

I checked out a couple of the sites that I'm interested in the ratings of;

None of these sites have a ranking of any real merit, but I am going to keep the toolbar installed and see if over a period of time using the toolbar myself will raise the ranking.

The toolbar does let you pull up some interesting information on any site but I'm not entirely convinced that there is any real value to the information unless the page you're looking at is perhaps in the top 10,000 on the Alexa ranking system. If the stats are accurate then you could argue that for a webdesigner it could help you identify sites to target if your looking to solicit backlinks, but surely Google pagerank is a more useful tool.

One of the sites I found suggests that if your thinking of advertising on the we you should you use the toolbar to help you evaluate the worth of the site on which you plan to advertise. If that's the main reason for installing the toolbar and it collects data from users then surely that data will be heavily skewed.

I'd love to know what you guys think of this blast from the past.

This is my plan I am going to ask the users of sesameforums.co.uk a real helpful bunch to install the toolbar and look to see if that increases the alexa rating of the site and more importnatly if it has any effect on traffic - if it does maybe Alexa is a forgotten secret of the web! I will report back soon.