Alexa ranking has long been a yardstick to determine how popular a site is in terms of traffic. How Alexa used to do this was to encourage users to download and install the Alexa toolbar onto your browser and using it to collect user browsing behaviors and data of sites that you visit. This has been going on for too long and there has always been ways to manipulate the rankings by writing scripts to trigger self visits to the websites you own, which in turn causes some webmasters and marketers to believe that Alexa rankings aren’t even accurate.

However, the good news is that Alexa has announced that they had made some changes to their ranking system. According to the announcement:

More sources
Alexa ratings are now based on more sources of data to give a better indicator of websie popularity.

Improved methodology
Alexa is normalizing the traffic from their global panel to provide consistently accurate rankings for all countries.

Better Rankings
The rankings are now even better indication of website popularity due to new and improved algorithms.

Alexa is also hinting some other new features quoting:

We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

Overall, this is a good move by Alexa. The whole ranking system hasn’t been updated for so long and with Quancast and Compete catching up on Alexa’s neck, it’s time for a change (for the better) or else it will be all too late.

DavidTan.org seems to be ranking *a bit* better now, jumping from last week’s 500K++ to the current 400K++, but that’s propbably due to improvement in traffic and not entirely due to the new ranking system. DavidTan.org alexa ranking