Alexa Finally Updates Its Ranking System
Alexa has finally announced an upgrade to it’s 10 year old ranking system - though by now, they might just be a little late in the race, with other players like Compete joining the fray.
When Alexa began displaying rankings in 1998 it was with the goal of showing Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community, and hence the rankings were generated through an analysis of Internet usage by people who used the Alexa Toolbar.
The biggest change is the decision to drop this reliance on the Alexa toolbar for traffic data, and aggregate data from “multiple sources” to compile the statistics and web rankings. The fall back, is that historical data from Alexa is no longer available, with data now only going back 9 months, and as their announcement states, the old data is no longer available.
As the announcement also claims:
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.
For a number of sites, this would probably mean coming to terms with a completely different rank.
Inspite of all it’s problems, Alexa still retained a high degree of popularity due to its broad global reach and completely free service provision - now to see how well that would translate for the new ranking system.
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