If you have a TGP and trade traffic with other TGPs, you're most likely doing that via a script and the links to those trade sites are generated by the script. However, if you're trading links with other sites with the goal of increasing your PR, which is an important element if you're hoping to get a good Google SERP position, then it's very important that you make sure those sites are linking back to you with a hard link.

For those of you that don't understand the difference, a soft link might look something like this, http://www.theirsite.com/popit.php?link=http://www.yoursite.com, where a hard link would be something like http://www.yoursite.com.

It's also important that the site is linking to you via a text link and not a banner and the text for that link should be descriptive of your site's content. For example: Click here for lots of free blowjob pics and videos

by KevinG

There has been debate among webmasters over the Alexa toolbar and ranks since it's inception. I have mostly defended Alexa as a useful webmaster tool, albiet, with a built-in "fudge-factor". Others have asserted that it's usefulness is limited because it relies on numbers based on surfers that have the Alexa Toolbar installed. Further, these numbers can be skewed towards webmaster sites, as webmasters are more likely to have the toolbar than surfers. Therefore, webmaster frequented sites will have a better Alexa rank than a surfer site with the same amount of traffic.

I am wondering if Alexa's usefulness is declining, or perhaps the scale has just shifted and I need to get used to it.

Alexa attempts to rank a web site based on traffic. The Alexa rank is a number that implies where a web site sits on a list, with #1 supposedly being the site with the most traffic. For example, according to Alexa, Yahoo is the number 1 site. Google is #2, MSN is #3, MySpace is #4 and eBay is #5. The implication is that the lower your Alexa number, the more traffic you have.

What has recently caught my attention is seeing web site traffic increasing, while at the same time the Alexa rank has changed to imply the opposite. I had a site go from 4,000 uniques a day and an Alexa in the 40,000's to 6,000 uniques a day and the Alexa rank change to 90,000. I have experienced the same on more than one site.

My guess is that the reason for this trend can be two-fold.

1. The new visitors to these sites are surfers that do not have the Alexa toolbar installed.

2. Since the Alexa rank is a comparison, there could be other sites that are increasing their visitor base that has the toolbar, thereby pushing down other sites that may have not even lost traffic, and possibily even gained traffic.

For me, as a person that has followed Alexa ranks since the beginning, it makes it harder to judge a site based on this number. About 3-4 years ago, in one of my marketing articles, I wrote "A site with 5000 unique visitors per day can have an Alexa ranking between 10,000-16,000". That was based on my own personal experience at the time. Now, my experience shows that a site with 5000 unique visitors can have an Alexa rank of 90,000.

My opinion is that Alexa's usefulness to a webmaster for judging another site's traffic has continued to decline. It is useful, imo, for judging very high traffic sites and very low traffic sites. Everything in between has a high level of ambiguity.

Kevin provides services in web development, online marketing and search engine optimization. He can be reached at kevin@cigar-review.com, or by icq: 271024660