Good news for all you webmasters who use Firefox (that’s like 90% of you), Alexa and Firefox has finally became friends and released a toolbar for Firefox. And it’s way better than the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explore.
The Alexa toolbar for Firefox doens’t even look like a toolbar. It takes up very little browser space. The traffic, trend and reach rankings are placed in the lower right of the Firefox browser, while a new related links menu is added to the top menu bar.
The Alexa ranking is generally pretty worthless but many ad networks, like Text Link Ads, use it to determine your advertising price so it does help to have a good ranking. Unfortunately, Alexa only counts traffic from users who surf with their toolbar installed. It doesn’t matter if 1 million people a day visit your blog. If they don’t run the Alexa toolbar, you will get a really bad rank.
Webmasters and web publisher always had a love/hate relationship with Alexa. We love to get a high ranking because it makes us more money. However, we hate it because it only worked on IE. Not anymore! Now all Firefox users can download the viewbar and give all your sites a ranking boost!
If you really want to be evil, you can install this Firefox add-on that will refresh your page every so many seconds or minutes. You’ll be in the top 100,000 in no time! 
Watch me get banned from Alexa now.
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There goes my Alexa ranking, the more people using the toolbar the more accurate their stats are going to become. Bye bye top 100,000
i just installed the risky add-on, and i hope it works
Me too.
I was waiting for this one for a long time. It’s very welcome. Hourra!
If you want to see my daily progression:
BlogaDollar.com
Greetings from France John.
While that may cause you problems over the short term, advertisers will pay better if more accurate stats are available.
90% webmasters all over the world,
but not in Russia.
Russia – 40%
Firefox usage is growing like crazy in Europe.
Indeed, according to a recent survey Firefox is almost overtaking IE in some European countries.
Not to be a Firefox downer but I wish they would add the ‘auto tab’ that IE has. Does anyone know if this is available?
Wow! Thanks for the Info John. Waited for it for a Long Time
i have 2 extensions installed on my firefox now
1. searchstatus: shows google pr and alexa
2. sparky
The Pagerank is great. I’m not so sure about the Alexa plugin especially for sites ranked less than the top 100,000 or newer sites.
This entry was on 404 an hour back?
There was a third party addon for Alexa with Firefox before http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ and it works in terms of ranking as well. Now its all the better that Alexa released the official toolbar.
I like to use that too since I don’t need so many extensions.
SearchStatus exist for long, long time. What web developers are you since you don’t use it?!
Also, anyone can make miscellaneous toolbars for IE and Firefox that will count hits to Alexa. I saw tens of them.
I can’t believe that you didn’t know that there are extensions for Firefox. Why search engines exist?
I don’t understand why it is better? SearchStatus is much better because also have many other features.
i still keep the searchstatus extension as it tells me the pr of a site
Does SearchStatus do the same thing as the Alexa toolbar does, or does it just give stats?
It show Alexa rank like text or like line on above screenshot. On right click on that rank, it shows links to Alexa’s pages about visiting site: overview, traffic details, incoming links, contact info (if available), if site is listed in dmoz then shows links to that category on both dmoz and Alexa’s mirror directory and shows related links (which are at top menu bar in official Alexa toolbar).
If you asked does using SearchStatus have same effect on Alexa’s rank as official toolbar — answer is yes.
Alexa is crap but this is good news for us site owners though
You are right it’s a far from perfect measure however its’ the best we have!
Not kidding. It seems like everyone has a love-hate relationship with all Alexa-like ranking sites.
couldn’t agree more with bigman. everyone knows alexa is pretty worthless in and of itself but hey if you have a good ranking, the better it is for you!
like so many other “ranking” tools out there…
Why you said Alexa is a crap?? Can u xplain to me??
I’m using it now, It’s been a long time coming for us diehard Mozilla fans. Let’s see what happens in the rankings now
what about us mac fans?
Firefox for Macintosh, then install the plugin, but I know you already knew that!
I like telling Mac to get Virtual PC for the Mac so they can run Windows apps.
FINALLY! Seriously, there is no reason this should have taken them so long to develop.
No kidding. I wonder what took them so long.
No kidding
Maybe they were kidding and the joke was on us!
Instead of constantly refreshing a page, a better way would be to use a tool like surfhandsfree.com that will auto-rotate pages that belong to a particular domain. That way you’re getting hits not just on one page of your site!
Demo: http://www.surfhandsfree.com/surf.php?demo=1
Thanks…lee
Nice One Jon.
Nasty but nice
Thanks for the link, that sounds like cool program.
this is so 3 years behind … about time the developers launched it!
Darin
I love the fact that they released this, this is so awesome.
John,
You might want to edit the title unless you really were wanting to say “Webmaters Rejoice!”.
Is this us mating on the web? I’m more into the real life mating…that’s just me.
ow, before this, they only works with IE.. now i know why my Alexa rank for all of this time is so… zero
Your firefox add on trick is truly evil!
Thats great news! I’ve noticed with a lot of the sites I run, most people are using Firefox these days…Over 50% or more….actually 54% is the lowest at a quick glance based on stats over the past 6 months. I didnt think to check till now. Thanks John!
Wow, you must have a large amount of “tech” type visitors. Mine is around 25-27%, and I think thats close to what the internet avergae is. Personally I use opera.
I think the only people who actually use alexa are webmasters, so how accurate can it truly be?
Does Alexa not use IP address in determining visitor information? It just seems like an obvious deterrent for those wishing to “refresh” themselves to the top of the rankings.
i know it doesn`t have something to do with this, but when are you going to give those ipod nano, that you get from that tech faire???
John,
Thanks again for your Breaking News!!
Jaime
I just read about this on another blog, and am glad they finally released this. I heard rumors about it for quite sometime.
at last alexa for firefox.
Wow, thats great news John. Finally, a toolbar for us Firefox users ..
I installed it already
Nice toolbar…..Going to download after post up this comment
Installed the toolbar and very useful
Installed the toolbar and am tempted to use the little refreshing trick ( but I won’t
). Should be interesting to see how certain sites, like this one, will move over the next few months.
John, linked to your point about the Firefox plugin abuse in my story “Alexa Toolbar Released for Firefox: Top 10 Reasons Why This Matters To Webmasters” – check it out here: http://www.ajvaynerchuk.com/articles/alexa-toolbar-released-for-firefox.php
Finally! I have been using the one from quirk.biz, but now I’m glad Alexa finally released an official one for Mozilla.
I’ve been using search status at http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/. Now I am trying this one
Yeah, I knew that one, too!
thanks for replying to me the other day… my blog is finally up and running now… but still in the beta stages… i would love some ideas and suggestions… =)
http://www.mikeytran.com/
just releasing this now? Not impressed. They should have had this done a long time ago.
Yeah, but still good that they realised Firefox is better… even if they did it that late…
Yeah indeed, really weird that it took them that long.
Now I have another search engine to look forward to.
Always leave it up to firefox to come out with something this great!
Well, I guess I won’t be installing this since FireFox won’t start after I installed it. Turned off all of my other Add-ons to see if there was a conflict, but still no go
. Any ones else having problems?
Nope. Everything installed just fine. Any way to re-install Firefox then try the add-on again?
“If you really want to be evil, you can install this Firefox add-on that will refresh your page every so many seconds or minutes. You’ll be in the top 100,000 in no time!”
It doesn’t matter how many times you refresh, Alexa only logs one visit per IP. You can refresh all day if you want, it’ll still only count as 1 visit.
That’s wrong information.
Though if you alone visit your blog/site with Search Status or Alexa toolbar it’s enough to push it into the top 400,000.
Alexa uses two scores to come up with the ranking – the reach and the page views. While refreshing your page over and over again won’t increase your reach, it will increase your page view, which will give you an overall boost in the ranking.
If you have a site like mine whose audience is primarily mid-stream Internet users, not bleeding edge enthusiasts, they don’t have Firefox nor do they Alexa toolbar. Otherwise, my site would be #1 ;
Yay, another toolbar that I’ll probably never really use.
I might download it, but I’m sure it will annoy me after 5 minutes.
Great john… – a friend of mine saw your blog and decided to “help me” by refreshing my four blogs (that run adsense) every 5 seconds… lo and behold i get an email from google – banned!
goddammit!
now I’m going to try to appeal but we all know how that usually works. $h!t!
I already chewed out my friend pretty royally.
im getting fun as alexa getting my ranking sites! thanks john
Lol, you’re really doing that?
Well, it’s about damn time.
-Eli
The Alexa toolbar is a good idea for Firefox. I haven’t used IE for about a year now, except for checking how my web sites look in it. The SearchStatus plugin for Firefox gives the PR, Alexa, and Compete rating though.
Nice Tool. Thanks John for the post
http://www.desibabesworld.com/
Don’t you think Alexa would realise, that the page is not visited again, but just refreshed?
WHAT ??
Alexa ranks are based on tracking one unique IP per day per site visit. Refreshing the page a zillion times wont put you up in 100,000..
Meh… A minor technicality… >.>
Nice, thanks for the info John. I’ll definitely be checking this out. Hopefully my Alexa rank will rise now as over 75% of my blog readers use Firefox.
maybe you should start blogging bout something useful for a change. searchstatus is better: pagerank, alexa rank, with more options.
it’s about time you throw in the towel on ur blog.
Maybe you should use the search feature. I wrote about Search Status months ago.
Search Status doesn’t report info to Alexa does it? I’ve been using it for as long as I’ve had my Mac!
Thanks for the news John, this is great!
Though Alexa might not be totally accurate, I still think it is somewhat helpful in getting a rough sense of how large a site is or how much traffic it gets (compared to another site).
Quantcast is a new open ratings site that I think could have a big impact on site ratings. This has the potential to be the new site standard as it’s pretty easy to implement and share your site stats.
Without having any Alexa rank to my Blog what can i do with this toolbar?
I’m surprised no one has “dugg” this yet.. digg likes firefox, don’t they?
Old but good news. Very exciting stuff
that’s good news,althought i dont’ use firefox
It’s not working with me