Did you notice a big change in your Alexa rating?
Posted 2008-04-18 12:53 AMI am not a huge fan of Firefox extensions because Firefix is already a memory hog before adding yet more overhead with possibly poorly written 3rd party extensions. However, I do have what I believe are important web master tools. That is Firebug, Web Developer, Google Toolbar and the Alexa Toolbar.
Of the above, Alexa might not be considered essential by many people but I like having it available to get some measure of how much traffic a site receives. The toolbar is also good for giving a little love to the people you visit often. Because part of the Alexa rankings come from users with the toolbar installed every visit I make to a site gives that site just a little bit of a Northerly jump in the Alexa graph.
Unfortunately Alexa is not highly accurate. Some people even go so far as to call Alexa totally worthless because the site only tracks toolbar users. That means sites with a heavy base of tech-minded visitors will tend to rank higher than a site with non-tech users. The reason is that tech-minded users are more likely to have the toolbar installed.
Today I woke up to a huge change in my Alexa rankings. Apparently the culprit is explained by this announcement at their site. Alexa is now pulling data from multiple sources to calculate their rankings.
This is a great move because hopefully it will give some value to rankings which are often all over the map. Though my site took a huge jump I noticed that many higher ranked sites stayed about the same. This seems about right because sites with lower traffic are probably harder to track than others because less data is coming in from the little guys.
Did your rankings take a jump too?
