The clearest changes are the new, metallic skin that covers the site, as well as the junking of the site's search engine. Previously, users would have to click a tab to navigate to the section dedicated to ranking websites. Now that's Alexa's first and primary function.
Alexa's most familiar features remain unchanged. Users can still find out approximately how popular a site is and compare it to other sites, but Alexa has added three new metrics to help judge how sticky a site it: bounce rate, time on site and pageviews per user.
Bounce rate calculates the percentage of users who land on a site and immediately hit the back button on their browser. A lower bounce rate indicates a stickier website. Time on site aims to provide a rough estimate of the total amount of time a user stays on a site, not just on a single page. Pageviews per user is exactly what it says.
But Alexa has discontinued some services, too. Users can no longer see how a site is ranked in different countries or change the resolution on the different graphs on a site.
Alexa representatives said they made most of the changes in response to requests from users and ad networks.
"These particular pieces of data have been repeatedly requested by marketers and investors who need to know more about the quality of traffic to sites," an eAlexa representative said. "Are the visitors to the site engaged? Is the site improving?"
The basic Alexa ranking system, last revamped one year ago, remains unchanged. Previously, Alexa had based its rankings on numbers gathered by users that had installed the Alexa toolbar on their web browsers. The Alexa toolbar adds a small graph in the lower-right of a browser window that displays a given website’s current Alexa ranking.
But because of Alexa’s growing popularity as a definitive indicator of a website’s popularity, webmasters, consumers and tech professionals started to scrutinize its methodology more closely, raising complaints about the accuracy – or lack thereof – of its numbers.
XBIZ.com ranks 25,740, while its consumer sibling XFANZ.com comes in at 117,402. The recently launched XBIZNewswire.com continues its steady climb, coming in at 637,163. Industry-networking portal XBIZ.net is still shooting skyward at 217,443, with a one-week average of 43,088.
Industry blog GramPonante.com remains in the top 100,000 at 97,640, and AdultFYI.com ranks 47,336.
Alexa started tracking website rankings in 1998.
