The latest changes at Alexa allow you to analyze your website traffic and rankings by providing more comprehensive website traffic stats.
By Anthony Gozzo
Web traffic rankings site Alexa.com (a division of Amazon) has finally changed their ranking system. Alexa will no longer measure data based on users of the Alexa toolbar, rather ranking traffic on websites based on aggregating data from various sources.
Although the service has been popular with smaller sites, which don't qualify for Nielsen rankings, critics have long argued that Alexa's reliance on data from toolbar users skewed the results and created biased rankings.
The initial concept for Alexa may have been to create a community of toolbar users and get a sample of Internet community worthy of ranking sites. Unfortunately, the concept was abused by site owners and companies that downloaded the toolbar solely for the purpose of hitting their own website frequently enough to get higher website traffic stats.
Interestingly, I’ve seen a jump in improvement in ranking for companies that did not follow this tactic, now that the ranking system has improved. Website marketing strategies that try black hat tactics are usually caught onto by those gauging the results, and in this case it seems Alexa has fixed this issue.
Alexa announced the changes in their blog, noting that many websites will notice significant changes in their rankings. The TenGoldenRules.com Alexa rank for example, has cracked the top 200,000 as a result of the changes in the website traffic ranking system.
It is important to note, that while website marketing strategies sometimes will focus on traffic, it is really the quality of traffic measurement that is more so important. This quality measurement is a factor of the conversion rate on a consumer site, as well as pages viewed, time spent, bounce rate, and leads generated on a business to business site are important website traffic stats.
Alexa web traffic rankings data that dates beyond the previous nine months will no longer be available, but in the company blog Alexa reported ongoing plans to adjust historical web traffic stats too. In the meantime, Alexa graphs will now only show the past 9 months.
So, if you are relying on Alexa stats for historical data to determine website marketing strategies, you may have to turn to other data in the next few weeks, or months, while Alexa catches up on applying their new system to historical data.
Meanwhile, you may also want to check the blog on Alexa for further updates and information about their website traffic stats.
For the most part, I’ve only seen that the changes to the Alexa tool reflect positively for site owners and Internet marketers.
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