Is Alexa Relevant Now?

Alexa have announced a shakeup to their traffic measurement service. While they have always claimed to be able to tell you how much traffic a particular site gets, that has never really been true.

Before they relied on data from their toolbar. Sounds great until you realize that hardly anyone actually had the toolbar installed. The only people likely to have it would be people who had it forced on them, or people who wanted to check their own or competitors rankings.

No surprises then that webmaster-centric sites ranked highly.

Now they are going to take in data from “multiple sources”. For anyone who has been using the service for comparative data, you will be disapointed to learn they have dropped their historical toolbar-only data, with the oldest records only 9 months old. Part of the previous appeal was to see your own traffic increase over time, now even that small morsel of utility is gone.

Hopefully the new methodology will allow for greater accuracy, but that would depend on what these sources are. Unless they are hooking into all the popular analytics programs, or have access to ISP data, this might not turn out to be that radical an improvement. Yes, the data has changed, and some are saying looks more even handed, I think the jury will be out for some time.

Posted on April 17, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0

Comments

One Response to “Is Alexa Relevant Now?”

  1. alexa ranking widgets on May 14th, 2008 10:09 am

    I heared the announcement that alexa has changed its ranking algorithm. I am little happy with this change because my website got little improvment. see new alexa ranking for http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in Fortune Park Hotels Ltd.

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