Reasons for Sudden Drop of our Alexa Rank -Bitter Truth

If you have been following my blog since few months then you might know that we had an blossom Alexa Rank around 18,000 and was increasing at a faster rate day by day.

Suddenly on June 30th 2012 Alexa Rank updated with a shocking figure 198,467.Directly from 18,000 to 198,467 which was not at all acceptable and it was clear that something has went wrong.

Update:Finally alexa people fixed my ranking and brought it back to normal.Feeling relieved.Thanks for your support friends.

Then I checked if it was only me who was affected with this ranking drop or others as well.I was amused to see that only my blog ranking went down whereas all others alexa ranking was just fine.This moment was very very embarrassing and I was surprised to see why this happened only to me as I haven't done anything wrong.

Alexa Traffic Stats that were captured few months back

Did the Traffic Decrease?

After confirming with other bloggers that it was only my blog which was effected and all other blogs rankings were just fine,then I checked if my traffic was normal or not.

• As I expected the traffic was completely normal and more than the before day.You can check the traffic details from the below screenshot.

Full Traffic Report

Again people starting speculating that I was getting more referral traffic for giveaway and organic traffic has decreased , so people were speculating this has caused a ranking downfall.

• The speculation is completely wrong.The fact that I was getting more referral traffic is true but the organic traffic was the same as you can see from the below screenshot.

organic traffic

From the above screenshots its clear that its not the traffic fluctuation that has caused the ranking fall and its definitely some issue from Alexa which triggered the ranking downfall.

Contacted Alexa Support:

Then I decided to contact Alexa Support through their contact form.I had to wait for about 24 hours to get an reply from them.Finally I got reply as follows.

Hello,  When your site's metrics are certified you can choose to base your site's rank on the directly-measured certified metrics in order to get a more accurate ranking of your website. You chose to base your site's rank on Certified Metrics and that is why your rank dropped from 18,000 to 198,497.
In some cases, your new rank will be better than your old rank and in some cases worse. The Alexa Rank compares your website against every other site in the world based on the number of visitors and pageviews to your site. If you choose to use Certified metrics to rank your site then the visitors and pageviews are measured directly from your website. If you don't use certified metrics to rank your site, then the visitors and pageviews are estimated based on data from our panel of toolbar users. Your rank may move up or down depending on how close the estimates were to the directly-measured metrics.
Do the directly-measured metrics for your site seem low? You can view the metrics on your Dashboard and Site Metrics Overview pages.
You can choose whether or not you would like to have your rank based on your Certified metrics by: 
1. Logging in to your Dashboard at http://www.alexa.com/pro/dashboard
2. Clicking on the ‘Site Management' dropdown under your URL
3. Selecting Configure Metrics Display
4. Checking or unchecking the "Use Certified Metrics to rank my site" checkbox
5. Pressing Save Changes

What does the above reply mean?

The support said that as I am using certified site metrics so my ranking will be calculated on the basis of my site metrics instead of their usual algorithm which is taken from toolbar.That means PRO members have a different algorithm to rank their websites and free users will be judged completely on different algorithm basis.

Their way of ranking which they expressed completely sucks.Its atleast acceptable if they were in the favor of PRO members to get more memberships but that's not the case as you have seen above.

Conclusion: 

As a consequence I have cancelled my PRO membership and requested them to revert back my alexa rank to normal, which I think not going to happen.Anyways its not difficult for me to bring back my alexa rank to normal but it was a very bad experience with Alexa Ranking System.

Suggestion to Bloggers and Webmasters: Never upgrade to Alexa Pro Membership.It really sucks.