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What Would Cause a Serious Drop in Alexa Rank?

by jwmann2
3 replies
A website I own has taken a serious dip in the Alexa rankings. Went from the low 200Ks to 1.5 Million range. I know they the Alexa Rank is worthless but oddly enough the website's earnings and traffic seem to be at an all time high, which is the most important thing. Keywords still seem to be strong as well in Google.
Could it be that I generated too many backlinks at one time that it looked unnatural? Or could it just be a change in algorithm?
#alexa #drop #rank #serious
  • Profile picture of the author Lassarus
    This is only a suggestion, but have you changed your robot files or altered your site map in any way. I only ask because as far as I understand it, Alex works by sending out samples to their target sites around the web to analysis web stats. If you have a problem with these parts of your sites it may adversely effect how the spiders crawl your site.

    Hope this helps....
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  • Profile picture of the author Fantastic
    Less people with the Alexa toolbar going to your site.
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    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Fantastic View Post

      Less people with the Alexa toolbar going to your site.
      This. And even this, it can measure only terribly unreliably and randomly. Which is why it's a complete waste of time. The only traffic Alexa rankings can measure are based on the number of visitors to each who have the Alexa toolbar installed and running in their browsers at the time of their visits. They can't measure any other traffic. The only way to monitor traffic is through a site's server logs.

      The last time I looked at my "Alexa rankings", I checked out two of my sites. One, which is a private blog only really for my rather widespread family and gets almost no traffic at all, had a really low "Alexa ranking", meaning that they think it "gets enormous traffic" (but not according to my server logs!), and the other, which genuinely gets so much traffic, in floods, that I have to have special hosting for it, is apparently nowhere to be seen!

      It really is as unreliable as that. :p

      But when you look at what it's actually measuring, that's not a great surprise.

      These things are of possible, slight, debatable relevance if you're (i) selling a website to someone who for some reason "believes in it", or (ii) selling advertising space on a website to someone who for some reason believes in it. For anyone else, and any other purposes, I think it's more or less a total waste of time, signifying nothing.

      Clarified here ...
      Does Alexa give total traffic qty?
      (newb) Is Alexa important?
      How important is Alexa ranking?
      Importance of Alexa.
      How do you find the guru sites that are highest ranking in Alexa?
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