Alexa announced today that their algorithms have changed. Alexa is a third party website ranking service. Alexa is free and until Compete and Quantcast came along Alexa was the only game in town. You may see your Alexa ranking have a sharp increase or decrease today.

Of course you can use statistic packages and analytics to view your traffic. However a site like Alexa is a third party independent verifier of website traffic. Many individuals may be suspect when you tell them your traffic because you are the owner of the site and the source of the traffic statistics. Showing someone the statistics from a third party is more easily believed and leaves less doubt.A second reason Alexa and the others are useful is the rankings, they show you how you rank in comparison to other websites. Therefore you can view the popularity of a website, page views per person, what countries the visitors are from and more. Quantcast even offers code to put on your pages in order to obtain even more information, it is helpful to show potential advertisers the demographics of your audience and have them originate from a third party.

Alexa first received their data from users that installed the Alexa toolbar. Many did not believe the rankings would be accurate if the toolbars were not installed in a large enough population then the sample size may not be valid. Currently they state that the new rankings also take data from other sources.

Take a look at the new Alexa rankings here.

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