Alexa has changed its ranking algorithm and the Alexa ranking has crashed for top website and blogs. Previously webmasters would do anything to increase Alexa ranking, but gradually Alexa rank lost it charm as most dubbed it as unreliable and easy to manipulate and game…
Earlier Alexa generated the rankings through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar and Alexa Rankings became a yardstick by which website popularity is measured. Since the Alexa Toolbar worked on Internet explorer only, many years people kept on searching for a Alexa toolbar for Firefox, and many third party extensions like SearchStatus began feeding Alexa data. Finally the official Sparky Add-on was developed to track better statistics from Firefox users. Recently they stopped Alexa redirects, a common hack to increase Alexa ranks.
Now Alexa has changed their algorithm and aggregates data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users. They believe that the new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users, and hence be more reliable as a popularity indicator. You can show off your Alexa rank on custom Alexa Tshirts too.
Well the long range graphs are gone, and now you can only get 9 months of historical data, but they promise it will be all back as they are recalculating historic traffic data over the coming weeks.
The Alexa top ranks leaderboard has changed too. View the Global rankings and Yahoo sites on top, followed by Google, Youtube, Windows Live and MSN…. The Top India rankings reveal Google India, Yahoo, Google.com, Orkut and Rediff… QOT ranking also fell by over 10000 ranks! We are now at around 33000. How about you?