Alexa ranking changes: What does it mean?
This has beena bad habit for a long time. Check once a day what’s been going on with my Alexa rankings. Everyone knows the ranking were not of much relevance unless you were comparing sites in the same industry or market.
So when I check today, surprise, the ranking of my site has gone up form 36,000 yesterday to 16,000 today. Brillianto! Once I got rid of the doubts about an error, I opened my eyes and saw this message:
Yay. Click and go in. And there is a more detailed explanation of the ranking changes.
The most important change seems to be that Alexa nowrelies not just on the toolbar, but also on a variety of other data sources. What are these other sources? Metacrawler.com etc? No clarity on that yet.
My first impression is that yes, the new rankings are a lot more accurate. Till now, it was easy to find sites with just 5k unique users a day, and maybe 10k pageviews a day ranking much, much better than my own site which easily has 15-25k users on any given day. So this ranking change seems to have got that right.
For this site, around 40 % of the visitors have been from India – a demographic which Alewxa never seemed to bother about much. Now it looks like it has changed.
From my quick checking of sites whose traffic levels I am aware of, and comparing them to my own site, things are a lot better for Alexa.
I will be doing some serious study of where everyone stands – and will keep an eye out for all those analyses by experts that are going to come in anytime now.