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Blogs ยป Archive for April 27th, 2006
The Great Alexa Spike of 2006
It seems to have passed without much comment, but there seem to have been some significant changes at Alexa recently — most notably sites that appeal to a more tach-savvy audience are making huge leaps up the rankings. The phenomenon can be seen clearlyacross all major web development sites — from W3Schools.com to W3C.org to SitePoint.com — but also across a long list of sites with more general appeal to tech users, such as Flickr.com, Del.icio.us and Slashdot.org.
Meanwhile sites with no notable ‘tech-skew’ (i.e. CNN.com, EBAY.com, etc) have either held firm or been shuffled backwards by the sites bubbling up around them.
It raises some interesting questions:
- Have Alexa changed their statistical algorithms?
- Is this a temporary anomoly?
- Which sites lost out the worst?
It certainly seems that the Alexa ranking system has undergone a radical shift in it’s demographic in the past 18 months.
Alexa got their first big push in 1998 when they had their toolbar included in the Netscape 4 default install. A year later they pulled off a huge coup by getting it included in Internet Explorer 4.
At the time most users would have just assumed (as I did) that it was simply …
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