Alexa redirects were a common strategy adopted by webmasters to increase Alexa ranking, though there was no official confirmation of this issue from Alexa. However, these Alexa redirected links were widely used instead of the main site url, to which they anyway redirected… and now all Alexa redirects are gone and show 404 errors.
Alexa Redirects to Increase Alexa Ranking?
Example of an Alexa redirect would be
redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.quickonlinetips.com
which should direct to our main url www.quickonlinetips.com, but it is now broken and a 404 error. If you trace back to the subdomain redirect.alexa.com, that too is 404, which might mean that Alexa has stopped hosting this subdomain altogether.
It was believed that Alexa redirects would count as unique hits to Alexa as people clicked on these urls to redirect them to their own website. It might seem strange that people would list their url on forums and email signatures like this, but it had a purpose… redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.blogname.com
However, this brings to rest the issue if Alexa redirects work, as they are no longer there. There is no official announcement from Alexa, but I believe they removed this issue to remove any confusion or misuse about these controversial redirects.
It is well known that you can increase Alexa Ranking by Alexa Toolbar for IE and Sparky for Firefox. These add on tools on the web browsers keep count of site visitors and help determining the Alexa Ranking. If you get more visitors who have web browsers loaded with Alexa Toolbar and Sparky, higher is your Alexa ranking. Here is our Alexa rank.