Have you checked your Alexa rank?

Apr 04

Have you checked your Alexa rank?

I don´t know how many of you have noticed, but there has been a change in how Alexa calculates its rankings, which has impacted the ranking of many well known sites.

The reason behind the changes in the Alexa algorithm is to have the ranking more closely resemble of actual site traffic. Before this change, the Alexa rank only considered visitors to a site those people that had one of the Alexa toolbars installed on their computer. The new algorithm will take into account that certain groups of web surfers are more likely yo have one of the toolbars installed. This is usually the case with webmasters, and among those in the techie community.

The most noticeable changes thus far have been among sites with heavy SEO based readerships. You would also expect that blogs in general fall in the rankings, since many of them “promote” and encourage their readers to install the Alexa toolbars to bolster their own rankings. The biggest beneficiaries from these changes should be e-commerce type sites, as well as sites with a younger reader base.

Although it is used by some companies, like PayPerPost and others, your actual Alexa rank isn´t really that important. Most of the time it just used to compare traffic rankings of sites within the same niches. I am certain that most of us will not see any practical impact from these changes and the new rankings.

For now there doesn´t seem to have been much of a change in my ranking for this blog, but I have had other sites where I fell considerably. How many of you have noticed a significant change in your ranking?