Quite different, but not necessarily better That Alexa's ranking system needed improvement is something upon which almost everyone could agree. Now it's been altered, and unfortunately for Alexa, the consensus still lies in that direction. A number of people are happy with the changes, of course; some sites have seen huge increases, so they're more than okay with the way things stand. But the new rankings make the old ones look ridiculous, and even now, it appears that accuracy is lacking. WebProNews On Alexa Allen Stern writes, "CN dropped from ~25,000 to ~76,000 which is a shocking drop of 51,000 spots. I actually believe this is a huge mistake and is the highest drop I've seen so far. Yet our sister site, HTMLCenter actually moved up about 30,000 spots and now sits at ~95,000. The kicker is this: HTMLCenter currently has 15% of the traffic that CN has." Alexa claims to be drawing information from more sources and using improved methodology. Whatever it's doing, though, conversations about the update are often turning into plugs for Compete and Quantcast, which probably wasn't the company's goal. For the record, Alexa currently gives WebProNews a traffic rank of 9,372, and because we haven't much watched that stat, we have no idea how it compares to our pre-change standing.
Does CN stand for cartoonnetwork or something... Alexa Trend/Rank: #1,770,314 gnarfard.com is not doing too good haha how does the alexa rank get calculated?
I'm glad to see that they're making improvements and they're trying to do something different but it's all going to take a while to get right... watch this space I suppose...
In my experience, Analytics is WAY more accurate. But when trying to pitch to advertisers, the Alexa ranking is what they want to know about.
I've only ever used Alexa for basic analysis. I've never trusted the information they provide, so I might take a look at their stats early in my review of a site. They can give you a general idea of the traffic a site is receiveing, but beyond that I dont give their stats much weight.
No way. I'd put my faith in Google Trends info any day over Alexa. Alexa is easy to distort, whereas Analytics is generally not.