Have you gotten your Alexa tool bar with Firefox?

Previously, you may notice that we cannot download the [tag]Alexa[/tag] toolbar for IE without our computer’s spyware program going berserk and beeping “teet, teet, teet…..intruder alert, intruder alert”. But just late last night, I read that they have released the Alexa Sparky.

I added it in last night.

(hehehe, I am such a teaser, can you see my Adsense notifier as well?)

Now, some of you may wonder what Alexa is? Well, many people said it is the most unrealiable data but then, many more rely on it as a measurement of our site traffic and rankings. Whether you like it or not, some advertisers and ads company measure how worthy our site is by using Alexa. Good numbers sometimes fetch more money.

(just an illustration how you can compare traffic – LiewCF, Hongkiat and my personal blog 5xmom measures. Not this blog because it doesn’t even appear in the graph. LOL. The top is still a long, long, long way to go, isn’t it?)

You can compare traffic with other websites. You can snigger and gloat a little when you realised your site has more traffic than your nemesis. Or you can start working harder to get better numbers. BTW, the aim is to get lower numbers in Alexa. (the opposite of Google Pagerank, ok?)

There are ways to game the system. But my advice is not to try them. For example, the evil [tag]John Chow[/tag] said something about using the Firefox Add On ReloadEvery that refresh the screen every (specify our own time) few seconds. DON’T DO THAT. EVER. Because I am very sure it is against [tag]Google Adsense[/tag] TOS to have our sites ‘artificially’ refresh every few seconds.

Then, there is the Alexa redirect code which I won’t advise people using it often. Place it on your own blog sidebars or in forums and emails, but don’t ever leave your comments using those redirects URL. I will delete it because it normally goes into spam. Do you know that if you use the redirect URL too often, it will affects your [tag]Google pagerank[/tag] because the traffic goes to Alexa and not your site. So, don’t sacrifice your [tag]Google PR[/tag] for crappy Alexa.

Meantime, what you can all do is to get the [tag]Alexa Sparky[/tag] and together we can help to improve our Alexa rankings. Naturally. Not evilish.