Webmaster: Alexa Listings

I'm playing with the Alexa search engine a little bit today. There are some nice features that Amazon has built into this search engine of theirs. For this post, I'm playing with the Site Stats Button feature.

Getting listed is a real buggar though ... as in very slow. They seem to spider slowly, if at all. I have websites I submitted to them years ago that still aren't listed. Well, as of today they are because I stumbled across a little something, something.

Here, I'm just going to copy and paste the Alexa info in here before I explain:

Site Information Links

Make money and enhance your site with "Site Info" links.

You can drive traffic to Amazon.com Site Information pages (see example) and make money as an Amazon.com Associate.

If you aren't an Amazon.com Associate, you can learn more about the program and join by visiting http://www.amazon.com/associates.

How to make a link to a Site Information Page:

Links should be formatted as follows:

http://partner.alexa.com/amzn/redirect_to_detail?amzn_id=yourID&url=examplesite.com

Replace "yourID" with your Amazon.com associate ID, and "examplesite.com" with any URL.

Okay, now you have the Alexa information. First thing is, you must have an associate ID or this won't work. Amazon loves their associates!

Basically what I discovered is that if you use the URL string: http://partner.alexa.com/amzn/redirect_to_detail?amzn_id=yourID&url=examplesite.com and enter your associate ID and the website you want listed where it says examplesite.com ... then, just drop that into your browsers address field and submit. What might happen on the first submit is that you get a return page saying sorry we can't find that information. Submit it again. In fact, I kept submitting it until I got a listing page.

Okay, so the listing page had almost no infomation on it, although some were totally filled in, it's still a start and better than no listing at all ... which is what I've been getting trying to filling in all the info about the site and waiting for them to index it.

So now the experiment will be to see if they spider the sites or not to get current information and screen capture of the index page. Anyhow, you try it and let me know results you see.