2009 Planning Guide - My Gift To You!Alexa Algorithm Updated
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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:
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?
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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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I don’t think you can take the figures seriously at all. It was bought to my attention this morning who had read the Entre Card forums. Seems a lot of that lot were affected.
Put johncow.com v dannychoo.com v johnchow.com in compete and see how the figures match up …. big difference and one not really reflected in Alexa either.
Neil Duckett’s last blog post..JR Yamanote Line - Hamamatsucho
Somehow I came out for the better - went up 10k in a matter of one day, from 45k to 36k, I think.
It’s really interesting though, to see so many much more popular websites to mine with worse Alexa rank, I’m thinking their still working out the bugs in the new algorithm …
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Wonder how long people will still hold on to whatever these external statistics sites say. Its starting to get absurd now.
alexa……………les miserable…………..coz my ranking drop recently=p
joshuaun’s last blog post..Social community
I have a lot of sites. I track all the stats. The new system unless it is slowly going to change, is just as inaccurate across my network if not more so. Stupid worthless numbers. God, I could just make up a random one and it would be more accurate.
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You are probably pissed, but my site clickfornick went from 80,000 to 50,000. Previously it showed Johncow.com ahead of me, but now it shows me clearly on top. You’d have to agree the rankings were wrong, all dependent on how many toolbars are installed. Since Click for Nick doesn’t target people who would have toolbar, my site was poorly ranked.
I think the new Alexa ranking is probably more inaccurate than the last one, mine has dropped from 60K to 81k and I have averaged 150,000 unique visitors per month over the last 3 months, so god knows how they are working it out now.
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@ fatgadget, alexa should be more accurate after the change, i ve got 1000+ ip nearly everyday but still outside 100k … my alexa rankings for 3 month has changed into 32x,xxx from 34x,xxx, still decreasing,
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It seems as if all the major players in the make money online blogging atmosphere have been hit pretty hard by this new update.
I think every blog that I go to in the MMO niche or marketing has been hit with inflated numbers. Though, Alexa was never accurate to begin with, it seems it has gotten a lot worse.
I mean, I know for a fact that there are people getting less traffic than me, yet, they have a better rating than me now? And I have a blog that I only updated once in the past month and for some reason, that one has a better Alexa rating but with a LOT less visitors…
Jay
Jay’s last blog post..Alexa Ranking Change(s) - Still Inaccurate If You Ask Me!
My site actually increased by about 200k with the last update! Not sure why so many are reporting the downward trend, but once everything levels out I hope my site keeps on the upward side!
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Who knows if there has been any manual adjustments going on, but they did say they were using other factors now.
The most likely explanation for the MMO sector experiencing a drop overall is that previously it was far too weighted in favour of it (because more MMO’ers have the toolbar that other sectors). In that case, it could well be that they now look more closely at such correlations, and are trying to compensate for it.
It’s never going to be accurate whatever they try though. Like Google PageRank, it is best to largely ignore it.
Its updated alright and its better for us imo!
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I lost quite a bit of real estate too in the Alexa thingy. But I think it will take some time to see if this new algo will mean anything at all in the long run.
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