I do not know about most of you but I have seen my Alexa ranking drop significantly over the past month and I am a little surprised by that mainly because traffic to the blog hasn’t gone down, actually it has increased! This trend has been seen not only in my blog but also some other blogs around the blogosphere.

It seems as though the New Year is bringing a big change to the way Alexa might be ranking its websites even though I am unsure about any algorithm changes. Now some of you may ask, why does Alexa even matter? Well, here are its advantages

1) Alexa is a major deciding factor if you are planning on signing up for ReviewMe or Sponsored Reviews or similar pay-to-blog websites mainly because your total ranking takes into account your Alexa rank.

2) Alexa is also a big deciding factor in your TLA sales. If you are using Text Link Ads, then Alexa is probably a big deciding factor in that too.

3) Alexa provides advertisers and other individuals who are interested in your blog, an idea about whether your blog/website is able to sustain its visitors or not

4) Alexa creates an even playing field for all types of websites so there is no bias of any kind.

Now that you have seen the advantages, lets recap on its disadvantages

1) It may not be too accurate because not everyone has the Alexa toolbar installed and so you may have lots of visitors but only a few with the toolbar installed and that can hurt your ranking.

2) Subdomains or sub-pages are not ranked and the ranking is based on the main domain only

3) Alexa can be influenced with certain tricks that you can read about all over the web and that leads to some “artificial” ranking

Anyway, hopefully this post has been insightful and I would like to know if any of you have seen your Alexa ranks decline lately.