Replies to post #14385 on The Question and Answer Board (IHUB)

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

That's somewhat correct.

Alexa doesn't track how many different people visit a site. It tracks total pages served up to Alexa users.

Strike that. I just read up again on the new ranking methods.

http://client.alexa.com/destination_site/html/traffic_learn_more.html?p=DestNew_W_t_40_M1

It's apparently a combination of unique visitors per 24-hours and total page views. But multiple requests for the same page (MailBox, Favorites, etc) count as single requests. So if you leave your browser on Favorites for 24 hours with a refresh interval of 15 seconds, I'll count you as 5760 hits per day, but Alexa counts you as 1 hit.

That's good and bad. If someone leaves it on Favorites all day (I do -- not only do I see new messages more quickly, it helps keep my ISP connection alive), it really shouldn't count as a bunch of page views, but on the other hand if I get 50 new messages and click MailBox that many times (plus the times it returns there after I reply to a message), it's still only 1 hit.

Makes it less spoofable, though, so I'll definitely take the bad along with that good.

Looks like they finally changed our contact info, too.