If you see some changes in your site's rankings on the Alexa Toolbar or the SearchStatus Plugin on Firefox, it's because Alexa has changed the algorithm for calculating a site's popularity. According to Alexa's announcement page, "Alexa's rankings are now based on more sources of data to give a better indicator of website popularity".
The previous Alexa Ranks was solely based on the Alexa Toolbar. Visitors to a certain website need to have the Alexa toolbar installed in order for that traffic to count on your Alexa Rank. This system earned criticisms because there was room for Alexa ranks to be "cheated" and Alexa ranks doesn't show the true popularity of a website because visitors without the Alexa Toolbar will not be counted.
There's no news as to where Alexa will be "sourcing" the information for their new ranks. But give professional SEOs a few days before "theories" are put out in the news.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
New Alexa Rankings
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Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. It is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. Alexa toolbar is an application developed by Alexa Internet. Its primary use is to measure website statistics. This toolbar collects as well as gives some valuable information. Once you install it, the Alexa toolbar monitors all your surfing and collects information about what domains you visit. They use this data to rank web sites. The traffic rank they assign to websites is based on 3 months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of other users and is a combined measure of page views and users. Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on your website. If you depend on link or site selling as a form of monetization you’ll definitely want to increase your Alexa rank, because it’ll increase your bargaining power when it comes to ad pricing.
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