Alexa Changes its Algorithm Again

Has Alexa Changed its Algorithm Again? We believe it has. But this time, it is not only the algorithm that has changed. There has been a major change in the Website Design as well.

Here is a list of what else has changed at Alexa.com.

1. Alexa.com has a new design: An all new design with major navigational and visual changes.
2. New Stats: Bounce Rate, Time on Site and Page view per User. A new Contact Info and Related links.
3. Whats Improved : Better Navigation Between Features
4. Whats Removed / Replaced: An all new Site Finder.  Thumbnails of Websites are gone.

Alexa New vs Old

Alexa.com Algorithm Changes

For almost a decade Alexa traffic rankings were based entirely on the data collected from Alexa toolbar. After receiving huge competition from sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com, Alexa did change its algorithm last year (April 17 2008) that saw a huge shift (10 k to 100k) in rankings of many sites. While most of the bloggers observed a drop, some of them did get a boost.

Alexa Algorithm Changes 2009

Though nothing has been made official yet, here is quote from the official Alexa Blog

When we took a good look at the Alexa feature roadmap we realized that we needed to change. We needed to be more flexible and we needed to embrace some new technologies. So we decided to start from scratch, built a new version of the site with new technology, and along the way we took a fresh look at just about everything was widely appreciated with most of the webmasters admitting that rankings this time were closer to the actual figures.

It has been clearly mentioned in the quote above that Alexa is now shifting towards better technology to rank websites which gives us a clear indication of what to look forward to.

Facts that support our theory

1. There has been a major shift in the Rankings of many a site. Here are traffic rankings of some of the popular blogs and websites.

2. At the moment, the historic data of all the sites is available for only past 12 months.  It is very similar to last year’s update.

3. This change also explains the outages that Alexa has been experiencing in the past few months.

What do you guys think?