Anyone seeing anything different with Alexa?

sharp rise or fall of rank

[Macro]

Please save the comments on how useless Alexa is etc. ;)

Is anyone seeing anything different with Alexa over the last few days, does anyone suspect a different way of calculating site rank, has anyone seen a sudden sharp rise or drop in their Alexa ranking (without traffic being affected)?

[ByronM]

I see this all the time. I can go from mid 50k to 300k in rank in a heartbeat whenever my traffic has actually continually grown.

Alexa is going to have a hard time now that 99% of spyware programs consider it spyware and try and remove it.

[Macro]

I can go from mid 50k to 300k in rank in a heartbeat

Ah, but there isn't that much of fluctuation in the 5K bracket.

Anyone else seeing a sharp movement in Alexa rank but without an actual change in traffic figures?

[zootreeves]

Alexa hasn't been updating my sites rank for 4 days now, but the actual rank seems pretty steady

[Macro]

OK, thanks for your replies.

We have one site that has risen sharply and one site that has dropped sharply with no other discernible reason than a change is teir "algo". Oh, well, it doesn't really matter much.

[b0rdslide]

We had our largest spike yet, up to 41k, but seeing as the spike seemed to still be rising and Alexa hasn't updated anything since the 22nd it's kinda difficult to tell what it's doing.

Kev

[edit_g]

Yup, see this all the time, when clients come call me up because somebody else in their office installed alexa and their site rank shoots up dramatically... Oh sorry, no posts about how useless it is... ;)

[percentages]

Alexa is only really meaningful for sites with a huge volume of web visitors.

Those in the 10K to 50K positions will jump around in a totally erratic and non-sensible way.

The top 5,000 sites tend to be pretty stable, give or take the odd site that is either flavor of the month or has "special" marketing methods.

Some of my sites are top 500 and top 5,000 month in, month out. I don't have nightmares about it. The stats reported by Alexa are for curiosity value only. Your own logs are the things that really count.