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A brief background on Alexa:

Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users.

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In 1999, following Netscape’s lead, Microsoft built Alexa into the browser. Alexa popularity was reaching an all-time high with over 3 Million downloads. In June of 1999, Amazon.com purchased Alexa Internet.

Alexa has rankings, so what?

The next question is: why do Alexa rankings matter? In the end, they are no more than a metric for your site and actually don’t have any role in the world of search engines.

They do, however, play into various systems around the world such as text link companies, I would assume into Nielsen Ratings — maybe, and it’s fun to look at.

Let’s All get Widget With It!

Adding the Alexa widget to your site can and most likely will lower (closer to #1 the better) your Alexa ranking. But very few people that know this have actually done this.

I have been doing it on one of my sites to test it and it’s lowered my ranking around 10,000 in just a few weeks. I have seen other sites lower their ranking all the way down to the mid 40,000s just by adding the widget.

So how does the widget actually work?

The widget acts as if a visitor had the Alexa toolbar installed. As talked about in the brief history of Alexa, they had both Netscape and Microsoft install it on their browsers by default back in the late 90s.

More commonly today though, users will not have it installed by default. Instead, to be able to track those users so you can lower your Alexa ranking for your site.