Alexa Internet Ranking has been changed- Did you hear that?

Alexa has always been a standard for the website popularity over web for last few years. Not only it maps the popularity of our website but good alexa rank also ensures good offers in paid blogging marketplace. The websites with higher alexa rank always tend to do better over other links and sites.

Last day for the first time in this week I have checked my alexa rank and was amazed to see a drastic change in ranking. My weblog’s alexa rank dropped almost to half of the previous rank and it was within period of one week. I was not sure about the change in rank but there I saw the message that read “Alexa ranking has been changed”.
Puzzled by the standard of the ranking algorithm I read more about it on the alexa page.

Older standards of ranking:
Previously alexa used to rank websites/weblogs on the premeasured scale of link’s popularity over their own network. Alexa ranking was directly based on the popularity of sites among alexa toolbar users. So the ranking was schema was a bit different. There are few countries where alexa toolbar is generally used whereas in some regions its usage is almost nil. So that means for regional websites and blogs alexa ranking was not helping (although it is now standadrd for many tools).

The changed algorithm:
Now the new Alexa ranking is based traffic data accumulated from different sources and is not limited to alexa toolbar usage. That means now the ranking of the website/blog will be more fair and accurate. As the traffic details and ranking will be more real and correct, we can use them for comparing our postion in the system. New ranking will take refernce from different sources for traffic details maybe awstats, browser compatibilty etc. But one thing is sure that it is only going to help webmasters or blog owners in a better way.

Why the ranking has been changed?
Over past few months the demand for common traffic details was getting high for alexa. As all the previous ranking was depending upon the alexa toolbar or within alexa system (to be more precise), the ranking system was not fare and there were a lot of feedback messages, which after the consideration changed into new ranking system for alexa.

How it is going to benefit?
In past 4-5 years we all are just looking on Google PR which again depends upon link popularity and backlinks for a particular webpage. However after the revision in alexa rankings traffic details for particular webpage will play a mojor role in alexa rankings. So that means we have got an improved (not new though) standard for checking website/blog popularity like Google PR, Technorati, DNSCOOP. But for sure after this update web usage experience for all is going to be better.