You may have noticed there tended to be some wild Alexa ranking fluctuations lately. For example, Techmeme went from being close to 100,000 Alexa to about 10,000 instantly.  While many people don’t appreciate Alexa much anymore given the increase in other competitive services that assign a ranking to websites such as Technorati, Compete, Quantcast, etc.  But I still prefer to use Alexa as a good way to determine the valuation of blogs and other websites.  For example if I see a website that is over 20,000 on Alexa I can only assume it gets lots of hits and could make quite a bit of money based on its traffic.

Now Alexa has overhauled their system to give more advanced analytical information regarding the websites they track.  For example on top of the countries that most users come from, there is contact info, related links, keywords, clickstream, and demographics.  This is impressive considering that Alexa does not need websites to install a piece of code to track the analytics.

Other information provided by Alexa’s analytics system include daily traffic rank, reach, average pageviews per visitor, bounce %, average time spent on the site per visitor, and the % of users that arrive on the website through a search engine.  All things considered, I still heavily judge how important a website is by its Alexa ranking.  Alexa is owned by Amazon.com.

Amazon.com’s Alexa Internet Inc. subsidiary company is usually very reliable.  However, there was a temporary outage that caused some concern to many online publications.  Between May 20 and June 3, Alexa was not reporting updated traffic rankings on a daily basis.

Alexa is best known for their toolbar, an add-on to browsers that report a site’s 3 month ranking and harvests data for generating rankings.  On May 23, Alexa updated their toolbar for Firefox 3.0.

Amazon bought Alexa for $250 million in Amazon.com stock in 1999.  Alexa Internet is based in San Francisco, Calif.