I rently read a blog post about Alexa becoming worthless due to the fact its ranking system appears to be getting less accurate.

Personally, I have always liked Alexa, but maybe it’s because I know how to use it better than the people who critisise it do. I know it can be manipulated and is no good for proper tracking, but for keeping an eye on trends, monitoring specific sites and other uses, I found it very useful.

I also noticed the change in tracking recently, but have come up with a different conclusion to most. When using Alexa, I don’t only watch the traffic rankings, I also watch where visitors come from and what the traffic rank is in other countries.

On a lot of sites I monitor I have been noticing that general traffic rankings are dropping, but users from overseas is rising. Specific % rises are coming from previously under developed countries, India being a prime example.

One of my theories for why this is effecting Alexa rankings is the fact that Windows Vista is becoming more and more popular in the UK and is probably not as popular yet in developing countries. (must try and find a breakdown of % number of vista users in each country)

So why would this effect Alexa rankings? Simple really, as I write, the Alexa toolbar still isn’t available to Vista users.

What this means is visitors using older systems are still being tracked, but people with newer systems (using vista) are not.

As people using newer systems are generaly more affluant, site that receive poorer visitors will appear to be doing better in the Alexa rankings.

Comments are closed, but anyone who wants to post a comment email me at tj @ seo64.co.uk and I will add it for you.