I wrote a few days ago how I was giving PayPerPost a try and, aside from the insanely slow response times from advertisers, it’s not too bad.  I doubt I’ll actually reach $100 a month with their service, but it’s quite alright as I harbour no illusions of getting rich this way.  One issue I have noticed, though, is that in order to get many of the better paying gigs, I need a better Alexa score.

For anyone that doesn’t know what the Alexa Score is, it’s similar to Technorati’s Authority or Google’s Page Rank system where a particular website is graded based on various criteria.  In this case, Alexa is using three months worth of aggregated historical traffic data from (potentially) millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users reach.

For the most part, I have not really paid much attention to this site’s Alexa score because it’s not aimed towards the general internet population that uses the necessary toolbar; that being technically inclined people who use toolbars.  However, after seeing some incredible numbers for relatively new blogs, I felt that it was time for me to at least try and boost this number … even if it was boosted artificially.

So, for the last month, I have been using two automated services that have promised some dramatic results, and they were certainly correct.  However, instead of going from 855,000-ish, I went up to 910,000-ish.

Thanks … I think?

UpMyRank LogoLet’s start with, UpMyRank.  Due to the number of problems I’ve had with both the software, the web-based version of the software, and the quality of crap that’s being shared, I won’t even do the service of providing a link.  On that note, I think they should change the name of the software to UpYoursRank … at least people would be semi-prepared for the memory-hole intensive, dangerous site-harboring shenannigans associated with this service.

First off, we’re supposed to use some specific software that calls IE or FireFox and visits a bunch of other users sites with our Alexa toolbar-enabled browsers.  Each site equals one credit, and one credit equates to a visitor to a site of our choice.  Sounds pretty good, right?  Almost like a BitTorrent kind of sharing.

In theory this works pretty good (just like communism), but in practise if you “spend” 500 credits to get 500 visitors, chances are you will only have about 120 uniques.  Alexa doesn’t count repeat traffic on the same day, so this typically turns out to be a waste of 380 credits.  It doesn’t seem to matter what time of day you use these credits, either … you will typically top out around 120 uniques, even when spending 2000+ credits at once.

Now, while you’re earning these credits, the supplied software is going to other people’s sites as well.  This is a completely automated process, but I wouldn’t suggest doing this while you’re actually using the computer.  If you’re anything like me, the constant lost cursor focus and piss-poor coding quality of the application will leave you either mildly frustrated or in a blind rage.

I am not an IE user anymore, but this is the only browser on my machine with the Alexa toolbar installed.  The UpMyRank software will remotely call the browser and open a page every 90 to 120 seconds.  When this is done, if you were in the midst of typing something on your machine, or watching a video in full screen mode, you’ll notice that you have to put the current application back in focus before you can do anything.  Of course, you can get around this by running the application in “stealth” mode, but this seems to cause some rather ugly exceptions after an hour or two on my otherwise perfectly stable notebook.  On top of this, the application seems to be written by a first year college student that has not yet learned how to properly release threads and memory back to the pool.  After three hours of use, my machine had slowed to a crawl.  A quick investigation showed that I had 142 instances of IEXPLORE.EXE running in the background, with each instance tying up anywhere from 4 to 48 MB of resources.

Now I’ll admit that I’ve made this mistake a few times, too.  But I typically catch it in the first stage of testing, which is way before the deployment stage.

The next item that really wound me up was the quality of sites my system was silently being sent to.  It seems that some of the seediest, most icky websites online were using this very tool to increase their Alexa ranking.  After seeing some of the warnings McAffe popped up, I was tempted to bring my notebook to the gas station so I could hose it down with the pressure washer.  Even if I swap the hard drive, my notebook will never be clean again ….

So, that said, good-bye to bad rubbish.  Perhaps if there was some kind of quality control in place to ensure systems weren’t being blindly sent to scam sites, and if the credits spent meant “unique visits in a day”, the tool would have value.  But until such a time (and until they can write some proper automation software), I think I’ll just keep my sub-million Alexa score.

Alexa Booster LogoThe next tool falls under the same premise as UpMyRank.  AlexaBooster.com offers to send X number of users to your site, where X is the approximate number of members that are using the service at the moment.  They also require that you install some of their software that will make your PC into a mindless surfer, and it seems to be written a bit better than the previous package.  That said, I was never able to get more than 180 uniques in a given day with their tool.

Fun?  Wow.

At the end of the day, these two services actually hindered my Alexa ranking more than anything else.  Add to that the fact that you need to install some software and let your PC roam potentially dangerous websites while you’re away, and it’s just not worth it.

Thank God for VMware.  I would never want to run questionable software on my primary installation, and this company’s VMware Workstation package makes sandboxing an incredibly painless task.