Alexa Overhauls Stats: You Seeing Changes?

Alexa has long been used as a source for data on traffic for websites. Problem is, it has also long been known for being wildly inaccurate.  It is a decent indicator of trends, but not actual traffic. Well, Alexa has announced it is changing the way it counts traffic, according to a story on Techcrunch.

From the announcement:

In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

The announcement is, of course, spin. The system was flawed in it’s prior form, with total reliance on the Alexa toolbar. Fail.

Amit is tracking how this change has affected some of the leading bloggers.

For my part, I checked out Alexa’s rating for PCMech. It seems to have helped my ranking, actually. I seem to recall, last time I checked, the ranking was a little over 40,000. Now it is sitting at 28,945. Rock on.

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