All Posts Tagged With: "Alexa"

Over the past couple years, Alexa has received a lot of critiscism for their method of determining website rankings.   I know this because this blog has probably been one of its harshest critics. 

With that said, you’ll notice that I’ve chosen to continue displaying the Alexa widget in the sidebar to help have a positive impact on my rankings.   This is because, worthless or not, your Alexa ranking is still a factor that readers and advertisers use when trying to determine the value of a website.

Today I noticed that one of my blogs in the Alexa top 50,000 had dropped all the way to 183,000ish.  Of course I clicked over to see what was going on and here is the message I got about their updated ranking system:

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. We generated the rankings through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar. Since that time we’ve been delighted to see that the Alexa Rankings have become a yardstick by which website popularity is measured. We are grateful to the thousands of people who come to Alexa.com each day to check the Alexa Rankings.

In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

To me, it sounds like a nice apology for still living in 1998, but at least they are doing something to avoid slipping into further irrelevance. 

Now it looks like I just need to figure out if I can remove the Alexa “eyesore” in my sidebar or not.  It sounds like it is still a factor, but there is a good chance it will get removed sometime in the next week. 

How do you like your new Alexa score?