James Lee Copywriting

How strange is this.

In my post on Monday I was wondering why my Alexa ranking seemed to have plateaued.

For some reason it had stayed stagnant for a couple weeks at 487,912.

The only logical choice was to start implementing more traffic generating strategies. So I made the decision to create an article directory to accept articles from all you talented writers out there

But yesterday I jumped onto my site and was pleasantly surprised to see that my ranking had dropped like a rock to 338,570.

Sure, I was happy to see it plummet like that - I haven’t seen my Alexa ranking drop so far for about a month or so. But I didn’t think it was THAT odd.

Here’s the interesting thing. As I was making my daily blog rounds on Google Reader, I was alerted by Marcus Hochstadt’s blog that Alexa had changed its ranking algorithm at the same time that my ranking plummeted.

In fact, if you check out Marcus’ post you’ll see that his ranking, along with more than a dozen others, saw their Alexa ranking jump UP, on the average, around 125,000-150,000 places!

Coincidence? I’m not sure.

To be honest, I have NO idea why my particular blog was rewarded (if the Alexa ranking algorithm change had anything to do with it) and why so many others were negatively affected.

Marcus includes a link to Alexa’s website, where they try and explain the reasoning behind their move. But there is still no hard, statistical evidence that points to why some rankings were lowered, why some were raised, and why some were unaffected.

Here’s a snippet of how Alexa is describing the changes:

Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website.

While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.”

Hm… It’s just one of those things, I guess.

But if anyone has a more solid explanation of how Alexa is now ranking sites, I’d love to hear it.

-James D. Lee