Useless Ways to Juice Your Alexa Rank.

There are lots of ineffective ways to increase your Alexa, Google or Technorati rank. One of the worst is this: Hop on a link train when there are more than 10 people already on the train.

Seriously.

What’s link train, you ask? Well, a link train is a sort of the blog equivalent of a chain letter. We can see how they typically work by examining the “Alexa Redirect Train” described at The Pay Per Post Forum and then generalizing.

Here’s what happens:

1. Someone dreams up an idea for a train and announces it.

2. That person thinks up a list of rules for the link train, and writes them up, invites you to join the train and post about it– being sure to copy the rules.

I edited the list of rules on the PayPerPost site to create a typical list of rules. I’ve also inserted my comments in italics. Here goes, typical rules:

~Start Copying Here~”

“Some type” of Train by “Person who thought of it”.

Rules:

1. Put some text above the train to introduce what this is. (The purpose of this rule is to trick the spiders into thinking this is unique content. ‘Cuz you can see there is going to be a whole lot of copying goin’ on!)
2. Start copying on the “~Start Copying Here~” and copy all the things listed without removing the links. ( Note: The purpose of the links list is to make sure everyone who jumped on the train early gets a link. Those who jumped on later? Well….)
3. Move all the sites labeled “Newcomers” to the list labeled “Oldies”.
4. Add 5 sites that you want to include in the train and make their link like this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.example.com then invite them to join the train. (These are the people you are going to try to invite to join. If they join, and get other to join and so on, you might eventually benefit from the link train. Notice that the first person on the list never drops off the list? Well. . . )
5. Visit all the listed sites! (By the time I saw this on the PayPerPost forum, there are 26 sites I’d never heard of on that list. I’m supposed to click and visit them all? Regularly? Ackk!!!! )

New Comers
List of 5 blogs.

Old Timers: (A long list of blogs.)
Blog M, Blog L, Blog K, Blog J, Blog I, Blog H, Blog G, Blog F, Blog E, Blog D, Blog C, Blog B, Blog A(The blogger who started the linktrain.)

~End Copying Here~”

Ok. Those were the generic rules.

Say you came across this invitation, as I did, and there were already 26 blogs on the list. Let’s think about why this is a bad deal for me, a link whoring, traffic grappling an ambitious blogger.

Blog A started the list. He added 5 bloggers B-F, who we will call the second generation bloggers. He posted his idea.

If those five second generation bloggers followed the instructions to the letter, they posted blog articles with links to blog A and Blogs B-F. Blog A has gained 5 links. Plus notice that the second generation blogger are supposed to visit everyone on the list. Great for blog A!

Plus, as a bonus, Blogger A announced this list. Some of his readers may hop on the train, and link Blog A! Even better for Blogger A.

Ok, so now the second generation bloggers add five people to their listand invite them to join and tell them to start visiting people on the list. Those are the third generation bloggers.

They will post a link to Blog A, plus links to blogs B-F (the second generation blogs), plus the five links to the third generation blogs. And so on…you get the drill.

As in a chain letter, if everyone complies, after say 4 generations we see this:

Generation 1 blogs get 125 links and the blogger spends time visiting 5 blogs. (Generation 1 is Blog A.)
Generation 2 blogs get 25 links and have agreed to visit 10 blogs a day.
Generation 3 blogs get 5 links and have agreed to visit 15 blogs a day.
Generation 4 blogs get 0 links and have agreed to visit 20 blogs.

Sounds great for Blog A. Not so great for generation 4 blogs–but in principle they can add more blogs, right? And benefit, right?

Well, you know what really happens.

Eventually, every blog that might possibly be interested has been tagged. The later blogs can’t add anyone who would hop on the train, so they post the train but get no links and no visits. Blog A gets lots of links.

Since the rules require visits, Blog A even get visits for a while But let’s face it, do you think the bloggers in Generation 4 are going to visit 20 blogs a day forever just because the hopped on this link train?

No, they will visit a few times. They will realize they got nothing out of this. After that, they will be on to get more traffic some other way.

So, unless you read these trains the second they come out, just pass them by. Link trains will barely benefit you unless a) you have decent traffic and start the train or b) the person who announces it creates a javascript blog roll that adds all the links to ever bloggers who hoped on the train and c) the blogger who created that link train also created a javascript blogroll that includes every blogger on the train posts the javascript blog roll.

But very few people announcing link trains do that extra work; heck creating the javascript blog roll is a lot of work.

So, instead these link trains are organized to benefit the originator and the few who jump on early. In the case of this Alexa Link Train, this juiced the originator’s Alexa rank. But it won’t juice yours because you didn’t start the train.

So, if you want to juice your Alexa rank, don’t jump on the link train, add the Alexa traffic icon… as I suggested in my post on getting your blog traffic counted.

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