Alexa improve rankings system

Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on April 17, 2008

Alexa, the traffic tracking site which has always been criticized for being unreliable (by me anyways!), has announced that it has improved its ranking system.

Website statistics are now calculated using a wide range of sources. In their announcement they do not give much away as to the sources of their new data but I’m sure this will come out in the next few months.

I have never been a fan of Alexa as ratings can be manipulated very easily and it was incredibly unaccurate for non tech sites. Hopefully this new ranking system has changed this and Alexa will be useful as a basis for the traffic a site gets. Your blog’s Alexa ranking has probably been reduced but this is not something to be concerned about as most blogs and tech sites will have lower rankings (BloggingTips has went from about 40,000 to about 137,000).

You can read the official Alexa announcement here.

* Thanks to ProBlogger and TechCrunch for bringing this to my attention

Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on April 17, 2008 | Filed Under Internet News

13 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Stephan Miller@Affiliate Marketing Blog | April 17th, 2008 at 7:53 am #

That sort of freaked me out, so I put “alexa” in my Google Reader search box and ended up here first. Thanks for the heads up. My main blog was up in the 75,000 range and dropped back to 130,000. But another blog I had that was in the 170,000 range just jumped up to 124,000. Since I have access to my stats, duh, I can tell you that the new system is just as inaccurate.
Stephan Miller | April 17th, 2008 at 7:54 am #

Sorry about the @AffiliateMarketing thing. I didn’t look at the field before I hit enter.
Kevin | April 17th, 2008 at 7:57 am #

No problem Stephan.

Yeah im not sure if the stats will be accurate but it’s at least a step in the right direction.
Rob O. | April 17th, 2008 at 11:32 am #

I’ve always consider Alexa ranking to be a bit like those cheesy late-night infomercials that hawk “available for a limited time” collectible Nascar plates (with the 24-karat gold rim, of course). That is, what makes those “collectible” is that someone declared them to be so.

Alexa ranking has (until now, anyway) been mostly a self-propagating, viral hoax. Alexa-originated hits are mostly important because, well, Alexa says they are. And since so many bloggers have bought into the it, well, it must be true.

It’ll be interesting to see how this update affects things.
low calorie beverages and drinks | April 17th, 2008 at 6:14 pm #

One of my sites moved in the positive direction by 130,000 spots this week. I was happy.
Otto Marasco | April 17th, 2008 at 6:25 pm #

I have just had the guys at Alexa manually update my company info at their end. We admit to knowing little of Alexa; how are their rankings different to Technorati for example, who carries more weight, which is more important? etc Is alexa primarily a source for advertisers when assessing a blog to advertise on, or does it serve bloggers alike. I notice many bloggers have the “add this blog to my technorati favorites” button on their blogs, but you don’t come across anything similar in relation to Alexa. Make us think that Alexa is for commercial applications only.
Otto Marasco | April 17th, 2008 at 6:46 pm #

We forgot to ask. Does anyone know what is the relationship is between, installing the Alexa toolbar and rankings…
Chetan | April 18th, 2008 at 1:39 am #

Otto, it used to be that alexa rankings depends on the alexa toolbar installations in browsers. If you had many visitors having alexa toolbar installed, then you get better rankings easily. But now this has changed to some new algorithm.
Otto Marasco | April 18th, 2008 at 10:44 am #

Thank you Chetan
UK Travel Blogger | April 19th, 2008 at 6:26 am #

I don’t know.
Even if they improved their algorithm. The ranking doesn’t really mean any traffic for the site. It is only useful to bloggers in that it gives you an idea of how many people are visiting which pages and you can do that with a plugin.
alexa toolbar & widgets ranking | May 7th, 2008 at 2:48 am #

I heared the announcement that alexa has changed its ranking algorithm. I am little happy with this change because my website got little improvment. see new alexa ranking for http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in Fortune Park Hotels Ltd.
Chris | June 19th, 2008 at 3:55 pm #

My website went up minimally, however, now it is on a steady downward change, even though the number of alexa users has gone up, and the number of overall users has gone up. WTF? Any ideas?

http://www.vapropertiesinc.com