FireFox Referrals hurting your Alexa ranking?

an issue revisited

[Hobbs]

There was a post long time ago that I could not find again, it suggested that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by promoting the FireFox browser to our visitors, and in the process lowering our Alexa rank.

I replied refuting the possibility but I think I need to reconsider, it does seem like our Alexa ranking is getting a hit, at least not improving in proportion with our dramatic traffic increases ever since we started promoting FireFox.
(our Alexa rank is in top few thousand range)

Each month I convert many of my regulars to FireFox, referral earnings are good, but if you are like me, you could be shooting yourself in the foot too.

[Note: For those planning to talk about Alexa's inaccuracy .. I will stop caring about it when direct advertisers stop using it before contacting me]

[chance1376]

What about having a suggested extensions for firefox page and show the search status extension that has alexa built into it. If you were able to sell them on the FF download surly you would have a good chance of them picking up a few extensions that you recommend.

I agree 100% with the alexa numbers and direct advetisers any time you can show you are doing better than site b,c, and d. Its a good thing. You can feed people all the urchin graphs and numbers you want but that might nescessarly mean that they understand them or they might still assume that another site is better/popular than yours and has more traffic even if they don't say boo about stats with their advertising pages. So if you can show them something else like alexa it might help your cause. Sometimes you would be suprise what people will latch on to to determine which site is better/popular.

[WolfLover]

There was a post long time ago that I could not find again, it suggested that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by promoting the FireFox browser to our visitors, and in the process lowering our Alexa rank.

I am not sure about shooting oneself in the foot as far as lowering your Alexa rank, but I do have this observation: When I, myself downloaded the FireFox browser, I opened up one of my sites in it and did not see my AdSense ads. Then I found out that in the preferences, it automatically had the block ads filter or whatever it is turned ON. It came that way automatically. That sounds like a way we may be shooting ourselves in the foot. If we are promoting FireFox and the average user does not know or care that they are blocking ads, they will never turn the block ads thing OFF. Therefore those who visit our sites while using the FireFox browser will never see our ads and therefore never click on them.

If this has already been discussed to death, I'm sorry, I did not see this previously.

What is your opinion?

[Car_Guy]

I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.4 and cannot find a "block ads" option. You can set it to block pop-up ads (from all sites, or allowing them on certain sites).

[WolfLover]

Car_Guy, in my FireFox browser if you click on Tools, then AdBlock, then Preferences, then Enable AdBlock, then you can choose to "hide ads" or "remove ads", when you click on "remove ads", the ads are completely non-existant on the site you are viewing. When I downloaded the FireFox browser, I did not request the AdBlock, nor did I know anything about the AdBlock, so I never turned it on, it was on when I downloaded it.

[webdudek]

check out the extensions you have installed by clicking Tools->extensions.
It seems to me that you have an extension installed called adblock.
As far as I know it does not come with Firefox by default.
nevertheless, In order to block adwords you need to block specifically the path pagead2.googlesyndication.com*
If you did not do it by yourself, someone did it for you, either manually or automatically by something that you installed.
Do you really think that Google would have promoted Firefox that blocks adwords?

[Car_Guy]

You are right. Last night I searched for Adblock, found it, and installed it. (I haven't had time to try it.)