Alexa tweaks its ranking system for more accurate results

Web site ranking service Alexa has long been one of the most used, and one of the least trusted ways to figure out how popular a web site is. That's because it's difficult to determine a site's actual traffic without access to the owner's private data. But Alexa's reliance on a small army of users who installed a browser toolbar had an obvious tendency to skew the results toward tech-heavy web sites.

Now Alexa is using data from "multiple sources" and not just the toolbar to create more accurate rankings. The company isn't really saying what those sources are, but many web sites will see an adjustment in their Alexa traffic reports. Alexa also isn't admitting that its rankings were incorrect before, just that they were "different."

You'll also notice that you can only get graphs for the last 9 months of traffic. Alexa is recalculating older data and will add multi-year graphs soon.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: alexa, ranking, traffic