If you notice, many of the website that offers auto-surf services have a little or no page rank. If you check its Alexa ranking you will see that it is over the 1.000.000. So, do you believe this could help your website?

Alexa auto surf users complain that they are experiencing a drop in Alexa ranking after the initial increase. Since the number of IP addresses which take part in the auto-surf program is not unlimited, up to a point, the limit will be reached. There's just so many IP address for Alexa to consider as a unique page view per day during which your website ranking will stop improving.

If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

It is highly recommended that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.

Others webmasters says that widget does not help ranking. In fact, the Alexa website itself says traffic rankings come from the toolbar and never mentions the widget as a source of information. There are many bloggers and website authors who dispute this information.

However, I check it out myself to see who is right. I put a widget for 2 weeks on every page in my website. In fact, widget not helps improving my web ranking. I notice that the “page view per visit” increased. After the 2 weeks I take off the widget and left a widget only in the blog, and definitely, ranking didn’t change, remain constant, but the “page view per visit” decreased.

The Alexa Toolbar is an application produced by Alexa Internet, is a Browser Helper Object for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows that is used by Alexa to measure website statistics. It includes a popup blocker, a search engine entry box, a link to Amazon.com, a link to Alexa, information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that the user is visiting, and links relevant to the site the user is browsing. By early 2005 there had been over 10 million downloads of the toolbar, according to Alexa. But the company does not provide info on how many of them are actually used. According to one estimate made in March 2003, Alexa had a sample size of 180,000.

There are some privacy concerns about the toolbar, as it requests site data from Alexa and there is no information on how long Alexa stores these usage trails. Because of this, many anti-spyware programs label it as such. Though it is usually installed willingly, third-parties sometimes distribute the toolbar or access Alexa's API.

A third-party developer supplied plugin for the Firefox browser served as the only solution after Amazon abandoned its A9 toolbar. On July 16, 2007 Alexa released an official toolbar for Firefox called Sparky.

Source:wikipedia

Alexa does not provide information about their total population of toolbar users, but an analysis of Alexa data reveals this information by other means. Many Alexa users are webmasters and marketing junkies. They install it on their own systems, and their own heavy use of their own pages causes their Alexa page rank to rise.

For every Alexa toolbar user that visits a page, Alexa may assume that another nine non-toolbar users visited the same page. For every 100 toolbar visitors, Alexa may estimate 900 non-toolbar users are also visiting the same page within the same 24-hour period.

If you happen to drive a higher percentage of traffic from Alexa toolbar users vs non-toolbar users to your site, you can increase your Alexa rating faster. Alexa doesn’t account for users preferences or habits. Toolbar users tend to visit particular types of sites more frequently…users like webmasters or internet savvy marketers. So if you are an internet entrepreneur and you attract similar people to your website, most likely they will have the toolbar installed which would inflate the Alexa rating.