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Alexa enjoys a solid standing throughout the web industry. The site provides graphs of visitor trends for any website (at least for the ones that actually have a certain amount of visitors). After entering a specific website address the traffic chart appears with geographical distribution stats.

Main point of criticism: census methods

Until today Alexa mainly used it’s own toolbars’ data. Because its strong distribution in the group of techheads and webmasters, the compiled data has not been very representative in many cases. Alexa already tried to fix that by serious number crunching, but nevertheless sites with a tech affine readership had more “optimistic” charts, while sites with a broader focus came off badly.

Alexa data reloaded

Today Alexa inserted new data into its system. According to Alexa it is based on a wider range of data sources, of which one is the normalized global representative panel. Also the calculation method of the trend chart was optimized as well as the geographical distribution statistics.

At the moment the data only reaches back 9 months in time - Alexa already announced that the historical traffic statistics will be delivered in addition.

More info: Alexas publication of the new system

Article is also available in German: Alexa: verbesserter Algorithmus & neue Datenquellen

How do you like the new Alexa?