Massive jumps in Alexa rankings |
19 Apr 2008 |
For two days I was thinking that Alexa was broken. My site, www.southafrica.to, saw its Alexa ranking improve some 90,000 positions to 89,356 in the space of a day (this after never veering more than 10,000 from the 170,000 level since the start of the year). I checked my website traffic on Google Analytics and there had been no dramatic increase in traffic to explain it (in fact there'd been a slight decrease in website traffic over the previous week).
Alexa have improved their ranking calculations
After doing a bit of research I found out that Alexa have improved their ranking calculations, and are now sourcing data from multiple sources. The old algorithm was biased towards techies who had installed Alexa's toolbar into their browsers, and this bias seems to have been addressed (as witnessed by the massive improvement in airline rankings, whose users-base are not dominated by techies).
Airline industry improvements
At the start of this year I jotted down a number of airlines' Alexa rankings, and the new Alexa ranking algorithms have tremendously improved their rankings:
|
1 Jan 2008 Alexa ranking |
19 Apr 2008 Alexa ranking |
% decrease |
www.ba.com |
3 052 |
2 038 |
33% |
www.flysaa.com |
28 311 |
14 074 |
50% |
www.flymango.com |
61 032 |
28 998 |
52% |
www.kulula.com |
133 832 |
62 641 |
53% |
www.southafrica.to |
175 425 |
89 356 |
49% |
www.flightcentre.co.za |
190 788 |
95 169 |
50% |
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