Alexa statistics & Contact Form is Broken after Algorithm changes- As of Apr 1, 2009

Alexa Rank is a relative measurement on how popular a web site among the Internet community. Alexa is relative because it depends on the data of Alexa Toolbar users. And also Alexa Toolbar is only for Internet Explore which means it doesn’t count growing group of Firefox fans or any other browser users. But there are over 10 million Alexa Toolbar users who make it a recognized measurement.

Alexa orders web sites according to Alexa Traffic they get. That means a site with a rank of 1000 gets more traffic than a site with rank of 1001 according to Alexa, of course.

Alexa Algorithm Changes 2009

Here is quote from the official Alexa Blog:

When we took a good look at the Alexa feature roadmap we realized that we needed to change. We needed to be more flexible and we needed to embrace some new technologies. So we decided to start from scratch, built a new version of the site with new technology, and along the way we took a fresh look at just about everything was widely appreciated with most of the webmasters admitting that rankings this time were closer to the actual figures.

It has redesigned the web site recently and the release went on live Mar 31, 2009 (A Quick Tour of the Alexa Redesign). After that, it looks broken both in statistics and in other areas. I have been using Alexa for a long time. After recent changes, it is completely broken. For my site notesbit.com, it gives top visitors are from Pakistan with 36% hits. Actually, both Firestat and Google analytics lists USA as top visitors with 39.77% hit from USA.

Google Analytics

Alexa Statistics For almost a decade Alexa traffic rankings were based entirely on the data collected from Alexa toolbar. After receiving huge competition from sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com, Alexa did change its algorithm last year (April 17 2008) that saw a huge shift (10 k to 100k) in rankings of many sites. While most of the bloggers observed a drop, some of them did get a boost, but the results are not correct!

FireStat Statistics

I tried to provide the feedback to Alexa team. Alexa contact form is broken.

The Captcha keep on Telling “Captcha value is wrong”. By this they have completely blocked their feedback site! The release went with so many issues within Alexa; it is not useful to the public when statistics is wrong and feedback system is not working.This is very common during the downtime as companies look for cost reduction and go for cheaper options including inexperienced professional to run the systems! By this, they have completely blocked their feedback site. You can test here.

If it is fixed, update me in my feedback!

References: Alexa new design, April 2009
Alexa Changes its Algorithm Again