By nickel

Just a quick note to let y’all know that Alexa has finally released a Firefox-compatible version of their toolbar. I haven’t downloaded it yet, but let me let you in on a little secret… If you download and install the toolbar, your Alexa rank will improve over time.

The reason for this is that Alexa calculates it’s traffic stats based on the number of visitors using their toolbar that visit a given site. Since you presumably visit your own site quite often (writing content, reading/writing comments, etc.) this will give you a substantial boost (especially for lower traffic sites, where the additional visits will make a huge proportional difference).

Why should you care? Well, a number of advertising programs, including Text Link Ads, factor in your Alexa ranking when calculating prices (although you can set your own prices if you wish) and they also present Alexa data to possible advertisers.

In the past, you could play this same game with the Firefox SearchStatus extension. However, I recently started having problems with slowdowns in Firefox that I traced back to this extension and had to disable it. Hopefully the ‘official’ toolbar will fix this.