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Seems Alexa has finally succumbed to the thought that their ranking system, going by visitors that had the Alexa toolbar installed, was very uhm, 1999-ish, and that a change was needed to stay in the game with the other kids like Compete.com and Quantcast.com. For years webmasters have been complaining about how unreliable and inaccurate Alexa’s rankings are, and most of us know to a certain level, how easily Alexa was gamed. Just as an example: We think that Entrecard had an Alexa rank of nearly 1,000 because their widget would load in an iframe on every blog that would have the widget in the sidebar. That means every time a widget was loaded from whatever blog, Alexa would add kudos to Entrecard’s numbers. It looks like they’ve fallen nearly 1000% back, hanging near the 10K region of Alexa now.

Yours truly has been demoted too by the new system, falling down 500%, now over the 100K line instead of the previous 20K. Sure, its never nice to see your stats drop, especially with such a leap, but we started breathing normally again when we found out these changes have affected tons of sites across the board. Shoemoney, JohnChow and Problogger all got bumped down from their previous 5K spots, and are now well over the 10K marker. DailyBlogTips seems to have gotten a big bump too, going from 15K to nearly 70K now!

Ending up over 100K, we thought that we must have gotten passed by a ton of websites that have more traffic, but there’s also some suspicion that Alexa might have been doing a little manual adjusting like Google did a while back with its PageRank. Spot the differences - have a look at a screenshot we took a couple of days ago, and compare it to the current graph Alexa is showing:

Old:

New:
Alexa rank

We say suspicion because Neil brought up an interesting point in our previous post, might it be that Alexa has been seeking out sites of which they suspect, that have gamed the system? By being affiliated with a site like Entrecard.com perhaps? Neil’s Alexa rank is now 90K, which means in theory his blog should be getting more traffic than ours. We’re pretty sure the following screenshot isn’t accurately representing Neil’s figures, but why does Compete show a whole different story than Alexa…again?

How serious should we take Alexa’s attempt to stay with the times in regards to statistics reporting?

    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

So does this mean that anyone that actually uses the Alexa toolbar will have a lesser saying in what’s popular and what’s not? “Oh, they’re visiting site XYZ and have our toolbar installed, so they’re not part of the general population…we’d better let their statistics weigh less than whoever isn’t using our toolbar”.

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