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How to improve the Alexa rank of a sports blog

November 15th, 2007 | by Ethanator1088 |

I am going to start a live experiment. I am going to improve my Alexa rank on a sports blog. Please continue to check in to see how well it goes. You can bookmark this blog by clicking on the “Add This” bookmark button on the right or below this post. 2,231,006 is my Alexa ranking as of Nov. 14, 2007. Alexa keeps track of how many visits a site gets from a browser that has the Alexa toolbar. They then rank accordingly. If you have a blog or website, you want to have a good Alexa ranking. It is a cool tool bar you can get from Alexa.com. A lot of people do not give credence to websites with bad Alexa rankings. My goal is to have a top 100,000 blog at the end of  3 months.

Let me explain the steps and tactics behind the experiment.

1. I have already submitted my blog to Alexa, and the link is here.

2. I am going to install the Alexa toolbar.

3. I am going to ask my visitors to install the toolbar in this post and a few others. I still do not want to take away from the content of my blog. Sports fans are not your typical Alexa users. That is why this experiment is going to be tough. I am not being mean to my audience. That would be very foolish. Alexa toolbar users are normally Tech aware people. That is why “Tech Sites” have high rankings. A sports fan does not sit down every night to see what DoshDosh.com or ProBlogger.com has to say. They look at their favorite sport site or blog. Many good sports blogs have bad Alexa rankings.

4. I am going to do a few posts about Alexa rankings. That should bring some Alexa users to the blog. I know that this is a cheap way to bring them in. I believe that my content will keep them coming. Therefore, I have taken an existing Alexa user and showed them a reason to come back. That is not what I call cheating.

5. Run this experiment. This experiment should help the ranking. If you want to run an experiment on your sports blog, that is great. Please wait 3 months so my experiment does not have outside factors. :-)

6. I am going to add a new blogging category for this type of post. It will be Z blogger. That way it is last on my category list and does not interfere with my “Content Categories”. If I find that it deters from my site content, in any way, I will stop the experiment. This blog is for the fans. I am also going to post several times the days I write about this. That way it gets lost in the blog. I only want to help other bloggers with this experiment. This is not interesting to someone that comes to my blog that wants to know If Tommy Tubberville is going to stay @ Auburn.

7. I am going to bookmark this post and subsequent posts with proper tags. I am also going to ask my readers to bookmark these posts. As I said earlier, the “Add This” bookmark tool is below and to the right of this post. If you are new to bookmarking, you can check out this earlier post.

8. I am going to write more on the blog. That will give everyone a reason to come back daily.

The reason I am doing this is two fold

A. I believe that sports blogs should get respect from Alexa. Many people check out their favorite sports blogs. They may not have the Alexa tool bar but they should be respected traffic.

B. Quite a few advertising sites use Alexa to guide their forecasts. Therefore, if you have a bad rank, you will not get good advertising.

I am going to share all of my ranking peeks and valleys. I hope that this works and you can learn from my journey. Feel free to leave comments below. If you would like to talk about this in my forums I will start a thread in the “Off Topic” section at the bottom. Here is the link the the SEC Football Blogger Forums. By the way, the forums are also connected to the blog Alexa rank. Therefore, it helps the rank when you buzz around the forums. You can also check out your favorite team. :-)

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  1. 12 Responses to “How to improve the Alexa rank of a sports blog”

  2. By Ethanator1088 on Nov 19, 2007 | Reply

    I do not know if my score was about to change anyways, but it jumped to 1,791,462 in just 4 days. That is a 440,000 jump in just 4 days. It will be very interesting to see what happens in the following weeks. Thanks for stopping by the blog.

  3. By Ethanator1088 on Nov 22, 2007 | Reply

    Alexa rank of 1,613,235 on the 21st of November. 180,000 in just 3 days. Very cool stuff.

  4. By Ethanator1088 on Dec 14, 2007 | Reply

    Experiment moving right along. The current Alexa rank is 743,493. That is almost a 1 million rank jump in just a few weeks. This has been fun going up the Alexa rank ladder. There are not many sports blogs in the top 100K. I hope to be there by next football season.

  5. By Ethanator1088 on Dec 16, 2007 | Reply

    610,843 is the current Alexa rank. I moved 130k in just a few days.

  6. By Ethanator1088 on Dec 25, 2007 | Reply

    Today the my Alexa Rank is 560,526. I am doubting that I will crack the top 100k. Only the best sites get in there. I might do it next football season. It will be hard now that the college football season is almost over. I will try though. :-)

  7. By Ethanator1088 on Dec 30, 2007 | Reply

    478,469 is my Alexa rank right now. my weekly rank is about 250k. It usually stays around there. I am beginning to think that my rank will stop around there unitl next season.

  8. By Ethanator1088 on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply

    Now comes the moment of truth. Will my rank go down or up. My current Alexa rank is 397,321. LSU just won the national championship. I had tens of thousands of visitors leading up to the game and the bowls. My weekly average is in the two hundred thousand range.

    The only way I can continue to grow my traffic is to continue to write, and write stuff that people will come to see. It will be tough considering this is the off season.

    I will find more videos to post and stay on the recruiting trail. I might be able to break some news. That will surelly give me a boost.

    Regardless of the experiment, I am excited that I ended the season on a high note. The blog is just 3 months old and I am in the Alexa top 300k. I also made into the Technorati top 200K.

    This blog is really going to take off in 2008. Thank you all for coming and checking it out.

  9. By Ethanator1088 on Jan 16, 2008 | Reply

    WE are slowing down now @ 361,874 Alexa Rank. My weekly Alexa rank is only around top 300k. I will continue to post, but it looks like the traffic is going to be slow unitl next season.

    I know I keep talking about next season, but it will be the moment of truth. All of the hardwork I do now will show up during next season. I will have a great database full of old news stories and football videos. This will be a great place for SEC Football fans to hang out. That is my goal anyways.

    I have one month to go and I am 200k away from my Alexa rank goal.

    I know a secret that would surely work. I could flood my blog with all kinds of blog secrets. I could make this a blog secret/ SEO blog. That would kick this blog into high gear.

    I will not do that, but I might start a different blog soon. I will keep yall posted.

  10. By Ethanator1088 on Jan 31, 2008 | Reply

    305,293 is the current Alexa rank. It is still slowing down, but I might get into the 250k range by the end of the experiment.

  11. By Ethanator1088 on Feb 3, 2008 | Reply

    Only 12 days left in the experiment and I am still puddering at Alexa Rank of 283,832. A drastic improvement, but Failure is obvious. My weekly Alexa rank is in the 100k range so I feel confident that I will continue to improve, but just not in the 3 month timeframe. I have never broke the top 100k through out the process, that is my next milestone.

  12. By Ethanator1088 on Feb 7, 2008 | Reply

    8 days remaining and I just cracked the top 200,000 Alexa rank. My 3 month average rank is 193,589. What is even cooler is that my weekly rank cracked the top 100,000. my weekly rank was around 50,000 yesterday. That was the first time it cracked the top 100k. When your site does that it FINALLY show up in a graph. if you click on the Alexa widget on the right side of my blog you can go to the Alexa ranking page. You can see my little graph. I barely made a dent, but a dent nonetheless. :-)

    I am thinking about calling the experiment a success. I cracked the top 100k but it was only for one day. My three month average is under 200k. I will make a final post on the 15th when the experiment is over.

  13. By Ethanator1088 on Feb 20, 2008 | Reply

    OK the experiment is over. My end rank was 244,570. That is better than quite a few sports blogs, but the experiment was a failure in the fact that I did not end in the top 100K.

    I made it for 1 day which is huge, but that was not the experiment.

    I think my Alexa rank will stay around this rank until next season then it should hover around the top 90-120k.

    That is my prediction.

    Thanks for reading along and I hope I have shown that you can make your Alexa rank better if you want to. Even a Sports blogger can! :-)

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