Up until recently, Alexa has been best known for ranking websites based upon users who have installed the Alexa Toolbar. Because they only used the toolbar to determine a sites’ ranking, they have been highly criticized and many people have discounted the benefit and usefulness of Alexa saying that it is inaccurate. People have been asking Alexa to change the way they determine rankings for quite a while and now Alexa has responded. As of Tuesday, the ranking system has been changed and now there is a new and improved method to determine how a site should be ranked.
On the Alexa blog, they say that they believe their new system is much closer to what their users have been asking for. They say, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.” So what are the “multiple sources” you ask? Well, that’s a very good question and one that Alexa isn’t willing to answer. All we know is that the toolbar isn’t the only method they’re using.
Some sites have seen their rank improve while others have seen it drop. Alexa says that the new rankings “should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users” and it’s not that the rankings before were completely wrong, they were just different. CyberNet’s ranking did improve some. The last time we checked, we were in the 34,000-35,000 range and now our ranking for today is 27,078.
The one complaint I’ve seen so far around the web about the changes is that the long range graphs are gone and there are only nine months of historical data available. I too was disappointed until I checked out the Alexa blog and read that this is just temporary. They say they’re working on recalculating historic traffic data and it’ll be added back in the coming weeks.
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Despite many complaints on the various SEO and “blogging” sites, this new ranking is wayyyyy more accurate.
I looked at about 20 sites that either had public pageview information or that I personally know the traffic for, and every one of them had moved to a ranking that made sense.
Mine didn’t change all that much, just a bit.
I agree. I did a quick look through on some sites as well, and many of them received a bump. This update was needed pretty badly though since so many sites are becoming more AJAXY, and pageviews are becoming fewer and fewer.
Do they still only test IE?
This change has definitely been long overdue from Alexa’s part, and is a very welcome change by many online marketers. Glad to see Alexa become a more reliable source of data.
They have an extension available for Firefox that you can use as well, and so it’s not IE-only anymore. It’s called Sparky.
Like to see how many people use that. I think the IE user is a lot different from the Firefox user.
I’m sure there are more people than you think who use it. After all there are a lot of people concerned with ranking highly on Alexa.