Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Using the Alexa Redirect in your comments on Nofollow sites

Many blogs do not allow search engine bots to follow links left in their comments.  Google and many other search engine types got together as an industry several years ago and convinced each other that taking away the link value of links in comments would decrease spam and make it easier for the search engines to rank things better.

Personally, I think their effort helped a little and hurt in other ways.

Regardless you can still benefit from leaving a link in a comment if you do not put spam in comments.

When you write a good comment you might have a link that is relative to your comment or just want to provide your own site link in the comment itself.

If you precede the url with the Alexa redirect code, Alexa will track the number of people that visit your site through this link and this will help you improve your scores through Alexa.

Note.  A lower score at Alexa is better than a higher score (like golf).

Here is the code that you need to put before your url

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?

So for example if your sites url is

http://www.cafemicrosoft.com

you would put

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.cafemicrosoft.com

Then anyone that clicks on that code would trigger Alexa to take count of their click and help reduce (that's good) your Alexa score.

If you are trying to earn money from your blog, this can be very important for many services that pay bloggers to blog.

2 comments:

Peter said...

Hi Brett,

I used your tip for a post in my blog at Improving your Alexa Ranking. I elaborated on it and did some tests. I linked back to your post. Hope you don't mind.

Peter (Blog*Star 2006 and 2007)
Testing Blogger Beta (now New Blogger)

Sherlockindo said...

Hi Brett,

I think this method is no longer work because when I try it, I get this error message:

alexa service="redirect" error="illegal referer"

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks.