A case in point: My blog’s 3 month ranking had been 70,655  (still captured at Mark Wielgus’ Top 100 blog rankings)  – it’s now 157,638.

How an update can revise your website position by 80,000 positions is beyond me.

But that’s not the end of the goodness in store.

Mark’s 45n5 website has gone from 27,961 to  89,002 (a difference of 61,000 places)

The blogosphere’s most recognized ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s rating has been revised from 3,797  to 12,917 .

Which makes you wonder if these numbers are being pulled out of a hat…Given that a number of advertising-related monetization strategies use (in my opinion, outdated) metrics like Alexa – somebody out there is going to be hurting from this latest change.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t suffer from web stats/analytics OCD, though I like to look at these numbers to get a rough gauge of a site’s credibility. So what happens if a metric like Alexa is shot to pieces?

I suspect this move only speeds the migration of people to alternative metric services like Quantcast and Compete which seem to give more accurate traffic snapshots.

My advice all this time, that monetization is a better metric than traffic or page rank or (fill in your favorite) rank still holds true.

Now if 45n5’s Mark will remove Alexa from his ranking criteria and replace it with something else…