Earlier Alexa ranking system was considered very inaccurate. The rank was determined by the users who view your site with the Alexa toolbar installed. So the rank you got was basically based on the Alexa community. And since many users didn’t use the Alexa toolbar and it was also not available for many platforms, it didn’t present a clear picture. And it was also easy to game the system to increase your rankings.

Finally Alexa has decide to revise its ranking system and will now use a new algorithm. Now Alexa will compile data from “multiple sources” to give a better indication of the popularity of the website among the entire population of Internet users and not just the users of Alexa Toolbar.

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

Alexa is quite popular among the Internet users for determining statistics. Now with this new algorithm, i think we can trust it more. My Alexa rank received quite a boost yesterday. Did yours change ? What do you think about the new ranking system ?