Sudden change in Alexa Ranking

Has anyone else seen this happen this week?

[dataguy]

I have a site that was ranked about 30,000 by Alexa for the past 2 years. The domain name was owned by someone else before that and was grouped together with 5 other domain names by Alexa, with one of the other domain names showing as the main site when I would check on the traffic statistics. This typically happens when several domains are pointing to the same site. (I had emailed Alexa about this numerous times and have never received a response.)

Yesterday I noticed that the 3 month ranking instantly fell to over 400,000 but now my site (the only one of the 6 which had substantial traffic) is listed as the domain name when I check the traffic stats.

The other 5 domains are still shown together with my domain, and my "today" number is showing around 25,000. It seems as though Alexa is working on a canonicalization problem of their own (using the real definition of the word, not the classic Google syndrome).

I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this?

[followgreg]

To be honest with you...who cares about alexa, it's no search engine and their traffic ranking is a big joke...:)

[dataguy]

To be honest with you...who cares about alexa, it's no search engine and their traffic ranking is a big joke...:)

There are a lot of webmasters and companies who are serious about Alexa rankings, for numerous reasons. I sold a web site about 2 years ago for $10,000 with no traffic documentation other than its' Alexa ranking, and the company who bought it still believes that they got a bargain.

I've had several PM's about this sudden drop in rankings, but I guess no one wants to admit that it's important to them and write about it in public. Probably because Alexa threads inevitably attract "who cares?" posts...