To date, Alexa had based its rankings on numbers gathered by users that had installed the Alexa toolbar on their web browsers. The Alexa toolbar adds a small graph in the lower-right of a browser window that displays a given website’s current Alexa ranking.
But because of Alexa’s growing popularity as a definitive indicator of a website’s popularity, webmasters, consumers and tech professionals started to scrutinize its methodology more closely, raising complaints about the accuracy – or lack thereof – of its numbers.
As recently as August 2007, Alexa’s rankings said that YouTube had surpassed Google in popularity, a result that drew widespread criticism, not only because of its presumed inaccuracy, but also because of the high-profile sites involved. According to its own website, Alexa's highest rankings are supposed to be the most accurate.
"Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable. Conversely, the closer a site gets to number 1, the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes," the Alexa website reads.
But with the unveiling of the new ranking system yesterday, Alexa said that it had expanded its data pool beyond users who have installed the Alexa Toolbar.
"We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for," the Alexa website reads. "We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users."
Alexa is remaining mum on what these new sources are. That needs to change, according to online guru Brandon Shalton.
"Many people have not taken Alexa's ranking and data seriously due to methods that can be done to game or trick the system to show better values, or general questioning of the validity of the Alexa numbers," said Shalton, who founded the traffic analysis service T3Report.com. "It appears that Alexa has taken on that constructive criticism to improve their data. They mention that they are pulling other sources of data to assist with the final ranking determination. As with any data, there needs to be a disclosure of what the data is and how its collected in order to give credibility to the numbers."
Shalton said that T3Report incorporates the Alexa ranking number in its reports because customers use it as a rough gauge about the traffic and popularity of websites.
Webmasters who track their website popularity with Alexa likely saw a radical change in their website ranking yesterday. Alexa added a formal announcement soon after.
Although exact comparisons aren’t available, XBIZ.com saw its Alexa ranking jump about 5,000 spots to 21,793 while its consumer portal, XFANZ.com, made a dramatic leap of almost 60,000 spots up to 62,733.
Around the industry, popular adult blogs saw gains as well. LukeIsBack.com jumped approximately 10,000 spots up to 21,833, while GramPonante.com made a roughly 30,000-spot leap up to 51,116.
As of now, Alexa only displays the last nine months of data for a website. They said they're currently calculating long-term rankings and will add that information as soon as possible.
Alexa started tracking website rankings in 1998.