Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

Guys. You should really download the new alexa toolbar for firefox. It's shows a graph of any given site's 4 month rank trend right in your browser's bottom toolbar. Really cool.

Actually the SearchStatus plugin for FF pings Alexa for every site. ;-)

Expect Alexa data to be even more borked than usual over the next two years with Vista finding it's way on to more and more computers. Remember the Alexa 'spyware' in XP? Not present anymore in Vista.

If I didn't know what I know, I'd think this was interesting, but I've been watching a little gaming going on over at PPP for about 6 months now. (I am not participating, mostly because I didn't have time as opposed to some moral issue with gaming Alexa. )

Anyway they have put together a nice little group of bloggers that are gaming down their Alexa scores like mad.

Ingredients to Game the crap out of Alexa:

1. A great big bunch of bloggers - PPP is reporting 28,000 bloggers now
2. Any of the many Firefox plugins that report to Alexa
3. The linky plugin for Firefox
4. A decentralized blogroll of the 28,000 bloggers and just for good measure include the Alexa redirect code before every url in the blogroll.
5. Then mobilize the blogroll participants to hit a couple alternating blogrolls each day where they will run linky (It opens up to 99 tabs in Firefox based on all the links it finds on a page).
6. Alexa chalks up a visitor based on those pages being opened through the Alexa provided redirect.
7. Large numbers of bloggers playing along (28,000 or some lesser percentage of the total) then pushes scores down quite a bit. From the results I've tracked it seems to be very easy to get down to 5 digits and not too hard to get in the low 5 digits.