There’s more to Alexa than you know.

So watching my blog refferers, yesterday + today I got more than 500 referrers from this Alexa Movers & Shakers (English language section) section. There’s also the global section, the Korean section etc.

So what are those pages ?

The Top 10 Sites moving up or moving down in the traffic rankings, as measured by the change in the number of users visiting the site.

A more detailed explanation:

The movers and shakers list is based on changes in average reach (numbers of users). For each site on the net, we compute the average weekly reach and compare it with the average reach during previous weeks. The more significant the change, the higher the site will be on the list. The percent change shown on the Movers & Shakers list is based on the change in reach. It is important to note that the traffic rankings shown on the Movers & Shakers page are weekly traffic rankings; they are not the same as the three-month average traffic rankings shown in the other Alexa services and are not the same as the reach numbers used to generate the list.

I’m postioned #3 on that english section, in the Moving Up section. So I guess the #1 position got even more visitors. I know 250 uniques / day is not such a big deal, but remember rule #83:

Every visitor counts.

So here are a few other places in the Alexa website, that many of you perhaps never knew they existed:

1. Alexa Top Sites Service
   

   Alexa Top Sites lists are available programmatically via Amazon Web Services, allowing you to incorporate Alexa Top Sites into your own site, product or service at a more affordable price. The service allows you to create global lists as well as lists by individual countries. Have you ever wondered the number 5 site is in Lithuania? Then this is the service for you.

   Note on pricing: $0.0025 per URL returned (e.g. $.25 for 100 URLs).

2. Alexa’s Hot Search Terms, Movers & Shakers, or Top Sites with free RSS
   

   The feeds are provided free of charge to individuals or non-profit organizations for limited non-commercial use.

3. Put an Alexa button, graph or banner on your site (too well known, but still worths mentioning).

   Please note that you can always insert other websites in your graphs, and make a graphical comparison of their traffic. You can add a maximum of 5 or 6 other website. Traffic lines for each website will be colored differently.

4. Modify the ownership and/or website information (that Alexa shows for your website)
   

   Web site owners should use this form to add, change, or unlist the contact information displayed in Alexa, or to update the site name and description. Verified submissions will appear in the service in approximately one week.

5. Change the links that show in your Related Links section

   This is a very good tehnique that spammers practice. How ? Think of Matt’s Blog. His Alexa website information page is probably visited a lot of times monthly. Others can suggest his website as beeing related to Matt’s, so the spammers URL’s will show on Matt’s Alexa website information page too. That will get the spammer a few clicks. Not many, but a few.

   FYI, this is my way of saying: Don’t do this please. Just suggest the websites that ARE related to your blog’s content, because I can honestly say that Alexa’s automatic suggestions suck. Using Alexa’s automatic suggestions (probably based on a much poorer algo than Google’s related function) you might end up with a website about horses, in your website’s related websites section, with your website’s content beeing about planes.

6. Alexa Site Thumnails (a paid service now, as I previously predicted)
   

   The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access to Alexa’s large and growing collection of images, gathered from its comprehensive web crawl.

   Note on pricing: $0.0002 / thumbnail returned (i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnails)

   Alternatives to Alexa Thumbnails paid service, might be : Girafa.com, Thumbshots (only if the website is in DMOZ) and ArtViper website snapshot tool.

7. Alexa Site report
   

   The Crawl: Alexa will run a program, called a crawler or a robot, which will visit your site and all follow all links on your site, except those that are specifically excluded by your robots.txt file.
   The Analysis: Alexa will analyze all pages retrieved by the crawl, finding broken links, links to out of stock items and more.
   The Report: Alexa will e-mail the final report to you.

   Here’s an example of the report, for my blog.