Alexa is a web statistics company that counts traffic from a number of sources, primarily its toolbar userbase. Alexa rankings have become increasingly important lately as Izea’s Text Link Ads brokerage uses Alexa rank and Google Page Rank to set the price on text link ads it brokers.
Webmasters looking for a boost to their Alexa rankings had been using a loophole in the Alexa system to get clicks on links to their blog counted in Alexa’s traffic counts. By adding “http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?” ahead of their actual URL, Alexa would redirect the surfer to their site and count one visitor in the process. This had picked up speed in recent weeks, including a fairly good sized faction of EntreCard users using the Alexa redirect as their EntreCard URL.
Because Alexa extrapolates web traffic numbers from its toolbar users, a single visitor count is multiplied a number of times. With many of these EntreCard users seeing a couple of hundred clicks a day routed through Alexa, which Alexa would count as a few thousand visits, websites that don’t abuse the system have seen their ranks dropping the last few weeks. (Several of my sites that have actually doubled or tripled traffic in the last month have had a drop in rank.)
In the last few days, Alexa has shut down the loophole. Many of these abusers haven’t fixed their links and their potential visitors are getting 404 error pages returned by Alexa instead of ending up at the sites they expect to visit. The savvy web surfer can, of course, go to the browser bar, delete out the Alexa redirect and proceed to the actual URL. Most people won’t bother. As a webmaster who has used real content to achieve search engine and Alexa rankings for years, this fills my heart with a bit of glee.
Technorati Tags: Alexa, redirects, abuse, spam
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