I arrived home tonight after my second exam (Yay!, 2 out of 5 exams done) to notice that John Cow’s Alexa rank jumped from 22,100 to over 100k. I went and checked out Alexa and it says that they have updated their ranking system.

After a few minutes checking Alexa ranks on various sites, I can tell you the following. Quite a few forums benefited from this update, while bloggers seem to have been hurt by the update. JohnChow went from 5k to 16k, but surprisingly mine increased a little bit.

I think this update goes to show you how unreliable of traffic stats Alexa produces. I like to look at it for comparison to other sites Alexa ranks, but I certainly wouldn’t rely on its stats. I know a forum earning 500k a year that had an Alexa rank of 80k, while with the update it went up to 50k. This forum usually has 500+ users online at a time, it should definitely have a higher rank.

You can read the full details of the Alexa update here.

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