Alexa Updates Traffic Rank Algorithm
Over the last 24 hours Alexa has updated it’s ranking algorithm in a move to make traffic stats more accurate, they have also reduced the date range to a maximum of 9 months.
The official Alexa announcement states that “Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different.”, there’s a few people who will probably disagree with this but the new rankings do appear to be a big improvement. This now takes into account that users viewing a technical website are more likely to have installed the Alexa toolbar. For example SEOmoz, used to have a top 1000 Alexa traffic rank, while this is clearly a hugely popular website in the search industry the new rank of 9,197 is far more reflective of where the site stands in terms of traffic over the whole internet.
Other SEO websites seem to have seen similar drops, SEOptimise going from 55,000 down to 142,648, while I’ve noticed client websites with high levels of traffic and previously low Alexa ranks now take large jumps. The actual traffic levels are obviously still the same but now Alexa may have more credibility in terms of trusting a websites estimated traffic.
