When the new Alexa ranking system was launched back in April, many of us were disappointed as our ranking position went down. I read so many blogs that were truly stunned by this change from Alexa, but trust me it was for the better.

Alexa today is more accurate in ranking web sites; they rank more than 22 million web sites. Many popular web sites that offer tools and utilities still use Alexa as a major score card. I know there are a few people who think Alexa has nothing to do with how well your site is doing as far as traffic goes, but they’re wrong.

Since buying TechJaws back in May, we managed to go from an Alexa rank of 180K to 71K where we are currently ranked today. I analyze my traffic daily and I can confirm the traffic is consistent with how Alexa scores your site. Your Alexa ranking reflects the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

Alexa the “Web Information Company” has been around for a long time (1996). I recommend that you download “Sparky” at Alexa. This will show you every site ranking you browse to. The add-on is free and is located in your browser status bar and it’s non-intrusive with your web browsing.

Alexa currently gathers approximately 1.6 Terabytes (1600 gigabytes) of Web content per day. After each snapshot of the Web, which takes approximately two months to complete, Alexa has gathered 4.5 Billion pages from over 16 million sites. This information tells us that Alexa ranking is from 1 to 22+ million.