I've been dabbling on the net now for many years. I've written enterprise systems for government, niche websites for clients, but nothing is as satisfying as watching your Alexa ranking go "Ooomph, there it is!". Here's something I've discovered. Article directories. Simple, effective and what a winner if you want to up your ranking.

First, you're going to ask: Why is it important to have a high Alexa ranking? And, I'm going to answer: Because Google cares. And if Big-G cares, you care. See, Google watches different places on the net for 'insider stories'. One of the spots Big-G watches is Alexa. They make a habit of indexing pages under 100,000 Alexa traffic ranks on a daily basis. :-) See what I'm getting at? Alexa ranks you in many ways, one of them is by (somehow) tracking how many people visit your site on a daily basis.

In other words: To up your search engine visibility = up your Alexa page rank. And, here's how we're going to do it...

I started off in 2007 doing a small experiment. On one of my domains, I created a sub-domain: Articles. (This was before the ITPiMP.Network on itpimp.co.za). On this sub domain I installed an article directory script called ArticleDashboard. (What a fantastic little piece of coding.) I then started advertising this directory to several article distribution sites. These sites each gave me a direct link through which they would pump my directory full of articles. Thousands a week! Faster than I could count. (This would be my downfall in the end...)

I then (tinkered and played to) develop a method to get the articles to Google pronto. (But that's a whole different article all together). Using a combination of sitemaps and more. And, soon, my whole site was below 100,000 down from 12million and something. (OK, 1 1/2 years). That's when the action started. I carefully watched my site statistics. Google was watching... Brrr...

I started noticing that many of my articles were listed at the top of the Big-G index. First page sometimes. This, naturally upped my site visibility to other authors.

Google started indexing my site on a daily basis. Slurped 9 to 12 GB off my site every month. My Adsense started going up as my visibility started going up. Because my visibility went up, people started to link to me. Because people started to link to me, my page rank went up. And a snowball effect started. My Alexa rank finally hit 52,000 and held steady!

I had almost 400,000 articles in my directory. 1.8GB worth of data. This was my downfall. Before I knew it, my whole site had gotten so bloated with articles that it crashed. Database almost corrupted. Site admins furious with me. But, luckily, I had learned a few nifty things through this experiment.

To test this theory again, I'm installing ArticleMS on the sub-domain http://articles.make-money-online.co.za. I'm going to follow the above recipe and measure the results for the next 3 months. I'll only list MMO related articles, though, but it should still have a big effect.

For the record, our site's current Alexa ranking is: 7,542,837 as at 2010/09/25.

To check the validity of my theory here's the current Alexa Ranking. Or rather Alexa for makemoneyonline.co.za.

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