Alexa Changes Rankings Criteria Announcement
| April 17th, 2008You read it here first and now without further delay please visit the Official Announcement from Alexa.com.
Basically it appears as though they changed the algorithm to better display the internet habits of the average user over just the webmaster type user. Typically sites with high webmaster related traffic ranked very high on Alexa naturally as the average user of the toolbar was in fact a webmaster.
According to the announcement they will continue to make changes and not all sites were affected. How did I know about this so quickly you ask? Well Bloggeries went from 23,000 all the way back to 81,000. Doh! What else stinks is that it was 66,000 a year ago and I’ve been steadily working on it. I guess it is fair though and I’m still happy with the change despite it negatively affecting my rankings. I’ve said before that Alexa rankings were useless to some extent due to the bias of people using the toolbar; now hopefully they will have a little more validity in predicting other websites actual traffic.
Below is a quote from the announcement page.
“My sites ranking has changed; was it wrong before?
Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.
The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.”
There you have it people the old metric has changed and it’s a new era in the realm of Alexa. My questions to you are; did it affect your rankings at all? If so how? Also what do you think about this?
I posted about it on my blog and I think Alexa is gotten worse because 1.) they don’t even tell you how the rankings are measured and 2.) it’s STILL inaccurate, and almost worse than before.
Sadly, there are tons of blogs who have better rankings than me but I get 3-4 times more traffic. I heard they’re trying to pull some bullshit move to not count ALL toolbar users to balance it out with the regular traffic. Stupid…
Jay
I have also noticed that my alexa rankings have plummeted! What is really weird though is that I have a better ranking with another of my websites that I abandoned which gets almost no traffic.
Jay & KG - I hear you there. I don’t know if this change had made it more reliable or less reliable… I’m going with the later. That being said there is an adjustment period so who knows. I do know that I’m ranking next to some sites now that I KNOW get 1/5 or less the amount of traffic I do!
[…] Alexa Changes Rankings Criteria Announcement […]
[…] Alexa Changes Rankings Criteria Announcement […]
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.
Google’s algorithm uses a patented system called PageRank to help rank web pages that match a given search string. The PageRank algorithm computes a recursive score for web pages, based on the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. The PageRank derives from human-generated links, and correlates well with human concepts of importance.
The exact percentage of the total of web pages that Google indexes are not known, as it is very hard to actually calculate it. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. In addition to PageRank, Google also uses other secret criteria for determining the ranking of pages on result lists, reported to be a number over 150
Any word on how the new rankings are derived?