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If Alexa’s So Easy To Game, Why Can’t I Even Get Rated?

Posted on August 16, 2007
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I’ve been surfing the blogosphere regularly, looking for ways to improve the reader experience here at Philaahzophy. I’m also always on the lookout, of course, for how to improve the monetization of the site. A lot of advertisers use Alexa ratings to help determine the “value” of placing a link on a specific site. And a lot (as in the vast majority) of people regularly sound off about how useless Alexa ratings are since they can be “gamed” and manipulated so easily. What I can’t seem to find is how to actually get my rank to actually appear in Alexa and the “No Data” for “Links In” to finally change to an actual number.I’m not trying to say Philaahzophy is hugely popular, because we all know it’s not. But is a few hundred uniqe visitors a day really the worst on the net? And what’s up with the lack of “links in”? I know of at least a dozen websites that link either directly to my homepage or to specific articles. I’ve recently installed both the Alexa toolbar into my copies of both Firefox and Internet Explorer. All the articles on manipulating Alexa ratings revolve around these two tools. But It doesn’t seem to be doing me any good. Maybe the problem is that I’m just visiting the site as I normally would, but I’m not really interested in gaming the system. I just want a decent representation of the actual use of my site when compared to others. Is that really too much to ask?

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