GoogleTrends announces that they can now track website analytics.  From what I can tell and testing some of my sites, it’s not accurate at all (at least not yet) and I believe that’s because they are only using opt-in data.  None of my websites use any opt-in stats so we will still have to rely on other sources such as Alexa for now.

The service in turn competes with established public traffic tracking services like Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast, all of which have often been criticized for being fairly inaccurate. Will Google, with its mounds of search and clickthru data be able to do better? Maybe, or maybe not. According to the product’s FAQ, “all results from Trends for Websites are estimated” and “anonymous opt-in data sharing setting in Google Analytics.”

via mashable

Hey folks, if you don’t know what Alexa is, it’s a statistics web-app that “estimates” web traffic to a website.

As of today, Amazon, the company behind the Alexa.com, has announced they are implementing “The New Alexa Rankings”.

For the most part, most of blogs in our network has increased in rank. For some, the stats have “tanked” to the bottom.

Although I am sure Alexa still needs some more beta testing and work to do, it seems like it is very unstable at this point.

We will need some more time for the dust to settle sorta similar to Entrecard’s new credit system.

Alexa will never be as accurate as “real” stats but at the same time, I believe they should provide the most accurate statistics as possible.

Let’s see what happens over the next couple days.

If your Alexa ranking has “shot up” or “tanked”, please feel free to leave a comment with you website and your inputs on the new system.

Check out the new features this new ranking system will bring:

In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

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.

You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

Below are a few common questions we anticipate from the Alexa community, along with our answers.

My site’s ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

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.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.

We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.

Will you change the rankings again?

We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don’t foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.

I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it’s done we like it even better. We hope you will too.

We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.

Do you want to know what I think about this?

Definitely. We’ve been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we’ve done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.

via the Alexa Blog

Here’s an interesting site you can check out your “web” grade:

It seems like our Zedomax.com blog’s readability level is 1st Grade! Well, I am not exactly sure HOW they calculated that but it’s a good thing that our site is very easily readable…

It basically gives you a grade for your website’s search engine optimization. It runs a bunch of algorithms that I can’t even begin to explain and it also checks on your rankings and stats with Alexa, Technorati and the Google and Yahoo search engines. I was very surprised to find that my site ranked a 91 out of a possible 100 points. It also means that of all the websites submitted I am ranked better than 91% of them based on marketing effectiveness. How I achieved that I have no idea. Last time I was in school 91% qualified as an “A”. I consider this is a personal blog and I never set out to make any money, maybe I should change that perspective

via leochiang