Alexa's Ranking System Has Changed

I was checking my web sites, as I do weekly, and noticed some very different numbers than what I was used to. Normally, my sites move up or down a little every week. Today, the moves were huge.

Now, there will be those of you out there that don’t put any credence in Alexa ranking or Google's Page Rank. There are others who swear by them.

I am kind of in the middle. I like to use them both to track the ups and downs of how popular my web sites are.

I saw some of my sites jump from over 10 million to the 2 million range. Keep in mind that the lower the number the better. I try to tweak my sites to get them under 1 million and then work more to get them under 500K.

The old way that Alexa ranked sites was based on visitors that had the Alexa tool bar installed and running on their web browser. Not a very accurate way of measuring visitors, but it was the only way to track site performance for a very long time.

They have now changed this sole criterion and now are using "multiple sources" to rank pages. They don’t say what the additional sources are, but my rankings improved immensely after the change.

The sites I have that got a worse ranking were those under 500K, but they only dropped a little. The sites I have that are above 5 million improved immensely.

I don’t know what the other sources are but I am hoping that Alexa is now tracking visitors that do not have the Alexa tool bar installed. This should have a major impact on the rankings and hopefully provide a truer picture of web popularity.

Because of the new changes, the historical data is only listed for the past nine months. But, they are working on bringing that up to date.

Alexa plans to constantly look at the data and make minor adjustments but doesn’t see the need to make any major changes.

I don’t know what will be the end result of these changes but I hope that they reflect a more accurate picture of web visitors, not just those that have the tool bar installed.

I will continue to track my weekly results and see how the sites do. I am hoping that the rankings improve since there are many that base advertising rates based on Alexa rankings. The better the rank, the more they charge and the more I make.

So, take a look at what Alexa thinks of your site and track it for a month or two and see what the numbers reveal.