Worst Wordpress Plugin
Tags: alexa, Wordpress, wordpress-plugin, worst, worst-wordpress-plugin
Most blogs mention about best wordpress plugins to use. But there are some plugins which one should always avoid. And there is one among them which can be easily crowned the worst wordpress plugin ever made.
And the honor goes to Alexa Redirect Wordpress Plugin(http://blog.iamnotashamed.net/projects/wordpress-plugins/ - don’t want to link to him). Made by Aria at Trying to Follow Blog(http://blog.iamnotashamed.net/ ), this plugin adds this tag http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? URL to all your blog’s internal links. Its a very evil way to boost your alexa ranks. But why the plugin is the worst? Since it alters the search engine rankings as no internal link in your blog will point to your blog, instead they will first point to alexa. So your blog’s internal linking will get affected which in turn affects the search engine ranking of your blog.
Somebody took advantage of the flaw of the above plugin and created Better Alexa Redirect Plugin. It works on the fact that search engines don’t understand javascript and modifies plugins at client side using javascript. So normal users will reach blog via alexa whereas search engines reach blog directly.
Funniest thing to note is that authors of first plugin don’t use the plugins in his own blog. Why? Because he know it will harm his search engine rankings in this way.
So I would recommend people not to use the first plugin.
Update: Sorry for my mistake, second plugin has been implemented by the author on his site as well. But after reading the second last comment, I would put a warning: Stop using the second plugin if it does harm to your blog. Second plugin is purely experimental in nature.
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September 17, 2007 at 10:59 am
Hi, I am the author of “Better Alexa Redirect” plugin and I do use it on my site, so what you said above is a lie. If you want to check for yourself, open the source code for the pages of my blog and look at the bottom, where you will find the JavaScript snippet that does the `magic`.
The plugin is experimental, and it is designed to send `click notifications` to Alexa, because - well, not everybody has Alexa Toolbars on which to rely to record the clicks. This is NOT a fraud like i-Faker, Fakezilla, Fake Hits Genia, Alexa Boost Rocket, or some other fraud tool that sends hundreds of hits in order to make the user stats seem bigger. This is a tool to help you get every page click recorded to Alexa (well, if it actually works).
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September 17, 2007 at 11:01 am
What computer are you on ? If you are on Vista with IE7 probably that’s the reason you can not see the redirect.alexa.com prefix - if you read the plugin homepage you will see that when Window Vista user is detected browsing with IE7, the plugin disables itself, because otherwise the links will not work. If you are such a user, try visitng my pages with Firefox - you will see that the plugin is installed, it is active and it is working.
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September 17, 2007 at 11:28 am
I thought your links would be shown with alexa redirect, but since I didn’t see them I thought you were not using it. Sorry for my mistake. Error has been rectified.
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February 10, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Don’t laugh, but I actually used this plugin.
Now that I know more about it, I removed it…
I think you should als omention Hello Dolly… it’s useless, really
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February 10, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Web productivity » Yeah, I forgot about it too….Hello Dolly is just as useless plugin but I talked here of worst wordpress plugins not useless plugins. Atleast Hello Dolly Plugin doesn’t harm the site as these alexa plugins do.
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March 11, 2008 at 10:23 am
Alexa rankings are not important it seems. So is this plugin!:)))
travel to bhutan’s last blog post..Phobjikha Bhutan
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April 3, 2008 at 2:06 pm
If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ehotels.in Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.
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June 14, 2008 at 12:03 pm
FortuneHotels is right. Alexa is pretty much useless but it can be a good bargaining chip for when the time comes to sell you’re site. If you never had any intention of selling it to begin with then I say forget alexa.
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