Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Suggesting related links works by editorial review. You can suggest whatever you like, but it needs to be approved.
I did that two weeks ago for a site - no results whatsoever yet.
I seriously doubt Alexa is going to keep this practise when it starts to become big on a worldwide scale. They'd need multilingual staff in the range of ODP to do that.
(As you might guess, link-patterns affect use-patterns, so sites that link to each other often end up "related", as do sites listed near each in web directories. Link analysis is probably also used by Alexa to help weed out spurious correlations.)
Links created by Alexa are usually reciprocal, but I assume links suggested by website owners would not automatically be reciprocal, just because that's too obvious a trick. Either way, Alexa limits the number of related links shown to 20 per site, so trying to attach yourself to the Related Links of a high-traffic site probably wouldn't work, because other high-traffic sites would "push" you out of the list.
If I was suggesting Related Links to Alexa's editorial staff (and honestly, I don't, because it doesn't strike me as worth the effort at this point), I would follow their philosophy, and try not to manipulate the system too much. If you don't want to suggest your commercial competition, your only choice is to suggest some non-commercial sites on the same topic. Try to pick sites who have simliar traffic rankings, but don't have a lot of Related Links already; that might increase the chance your site will someday be listed in their Related Links.
In other words, list the same kinds of sites you could/would/should be trying to exchange links with anyway.
hehe - not very well...
