I’ve been playing the Alexa game to increase my chances of getting into the Top 100 Australian Blogs list. Now that I’m in this august company, I want to stay there.
One of the things that Maki from Dosh Dosh recommended was link redirection. Rather than fool around with changing templates, I installed the Alexa redirect plugin. It turns out that this was not such a good idea after all.
While my Alexa rank did increase, I had a reduction in organic search traffic from Google. I didn’t even notice until this morning - a friend pointed me towards an article by Lord Matt. It contained the following warning:
By potentially burning off search results and by causing hesitation on link clicking you will experience a short high but then a deadly plummet when there are no search visitors to maintain the levels. This leaves you in the gutter. Ouch.
Ack! Oh well, lesson learnt - I turned off the Alexa redirect plugin, and surprise surprise, my traffic doubled today. Doh!
I have the Alexa toolbar installed. I will continue to follow some of Maki’s other advice - but not all of it - I’m steering clear of autosurf programs 
Andrew,
I seriously apologize about the search ranking thing. I basically built the plugin after playing the Alexa game a little, and thought it made sense. I didn’t even use it on my own blog.
If you go back to my post and check the comments, another guy has written a much better plugin that uses javascript which is better I guess.
Again sorry, I’m going to update that post so folks are aware.
Hi Ariah,
please do not apologise - I used the plugin knowing that there might be some consequences (without knowing exactly what they were).
I’m not sure it is the javascript so much as the redirects themselves that reduce google traffic, but would be happy to take your advice on this.
Best regards, Andrew
That’s interesting, because it was when I took a look at this plugin and read a little more about it that I decided redirects were not for me.
Hi Cerebralmum,
thank you for your comment.
Basically, there are better ways to improve your Alexa rank - the best way is to write good content and promote your blog. The next best way is to ask a couple of friends to install the Alexa plugin and visit your blog rather than read the feed every day. The second way is artificial, but it is based on the theory that your ranking will be improving naturally as the blog becomes better known to the point where two more readers won’t adversely affect the ranking one way or the other.
Best regards, Andrew