Finally I've taken a time and organized myself to make something that is supposed to increase my alexa pagerank.

Alexa rating is an important number that is often being looked at. For example tеxtlinkаds shows only two parameters to buyers - the PR of a page AND the alexa rating. nothing else! So we have to do something about it.

I have read a bunch of articles that advise to ask all your friends to install the alexa rating toolbar and ask them to visit your pages every day, so alexa records these visits and reflects that in numbers.

But it is a very ineffective way, as:

• you may be in some niche that isn't connected with webmasters and internet at all, so your visitors may lack the knowledge how to write a comment, not speaking about installing the alexa toolbar for a firefox ("what's a firefox?" :)
• even if they are, they will get tired of doing that, so that way is not lasting and eventually your alexa will go back down

That's why I guess alexa has made another way, which we need only to implement and the alexa rating will honestly report the real traffic on the site, thus boosting it up under 50000 in three weeks (that's what they say)

The redirection itself is pretty straightforward, for example, the link to this blog would look like http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.vo1dmain.info

OK, then one could start and search-replace all his links, substituting them with the redirect links like that one. Fine, alexa rating boosts up, but.. You would lose all your google PR rating, because you will link to alexa from your every page several times each, thus making a great PR gift to to them :)

But we are not a charity organization, we will make it another way.

I have heard that there is a wordpress plugin that installs a pretty big javascript, which substitutes the real link with a redirect at the moment when user clicks it. Very elegant, because it's a clean way and everybody is happy.

This is exactly what I have done for Drupal, because there is no contributed module out there...

My final version of this javascript looks like this:

function alexa_click() {
  var link = this.href;
  if(link.indexOf("redirect")==-1)
  {
    link = "http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?" + link;
    this.href=link;
  }
  return true;
}

function alexa_attach() {
  $('a').click(alexa_click);
}

if (Drupal.jsEnabled) {
  $(document).ready(alexa_attach);
}

Here is what it does: upon readiness of a page, it attaches itself to all links assigning it an alexa_click function. When any of them gets a click event, the javascript reads the link and prepends the alexa redirection. That's all! Effective and elegant.

A thing to mention - this script uses the built-into-drupal jQuery library, which is why the code snippet is so short. if you want to use it on any non-drupal site, you will need to download jQuery (40kb only!) and include it into your page.

After creating the script you save it somewhere in /misc among all other scripts and create a drupal php block which will contain only one line of code:

<?php
    drupal_add_js('misc/alexa.js');
?>

That's it!

Let's see how it'll work. Today it is the 19th of october and alexa rating of this a bit forgotten blog is 2.9mio. This my javascript was installed today, so I wonder how good is going to be the alexa number in november.

And of course I am still under the great impression of the VPS hosting I have moved to about a month ago. The speed and control are incredible! Read my whole review about my new VPS hosting here