 |
|
 |
Home Page : Web Site Popularity
|
|
|
Ever wondered how popular your site is and how your site compares with other sites on the net? The following resources are intended to help you assess just popular your web site is (or its ranking):
One obvious measure of popularity is how many visitors your web site gets. If you don't already have a web site tracker then there are a number of free and commercial ones available. For a comprehensive list of free and commercial web site trackers take a look at www.cryer.co.uk/resources/websitetracking.htm. Web site tracking will tell you how many visitors your web site gets, but won't of itself allow you to compare your popularity (or ranking) with other sites.
Some "service providers" keep a track of the number of times their service (or one of their services) has been either been displayed on your web site or has referred visitors to your "target" web site. These services are then able to give a comparative ranking for a site against other sites based on their own usage. Results can therefore be used as a general guide or indication but should not be treated as 100% reliable.
| Service | Comments | Restrictions |
|---|---|---|
| www.alexa.com | Type in the URL into the "web search" box.
Also shows trend over time (up or down) and the number of links to site. |
Provides ranking based on the domain, not for a specific URL (or page). |
| www.ranking.com | Can obtain ranking for more than one site. | Obtains information from www.7search.com and www.linkstoyou.com, returns empty results when sites not indexed. |
Some search engines record the number of people who clicked through to your web site. In this way they are able to provide a ranking of how frequently a site is visited, however I do not know of any that make this information public.
There are a number of sites that given a web site address will return you with the number of other sites on the internet contain a link to your web site. These work by interrogating search engines to obtain the number of pages in their indexes which link to your site. Most of these in turn will then allow you to track back to the search engine to list all of those pages:
| Link | Search Engines | Max URLs | Reports by e-mail | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| www.marketleap.com/publinkpop | AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, AOL, Google, HotBot, MSN | 4 | No |  By way of
comparison it shows the ranking of your site(s) against 30 other
sites of increasing popularity. |
|
|
|||||
| www.widexl.com/remote/link-popularity/index.html | Google, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, MSN, HotBot, Lycos | 3 | Yes | By way of comparison it shows the ranking of your site against those of 20 of sites of increasing popularity. | |
| www.linkpopularitycheck.com | AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, MSN | 4 | Yes | If you provide more than one site then it shows a very intuitive comparison of the popularity of the sites specified. | |
| www.seotoolkit.co.uk/ |
Alltheweb, Altavista UK, Google, MSN UK, Yahoo | 3 | No | Well laid out and easy to use. Site also provides other on-line tools of interest to webmasters. | |
| www.uptimebot.com | Google, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Hotbot MSN, Teama, Dmoz | 1 / ? | Yes | Once you register with the site (which is free) you can compare the link counts for multiple sites. Unclear what the limit is on the number of sites, but is quite high. | |
| www.linkpopularity.com | Altavista, Google, HotBot | 1 | Yes | ||
| www.addme.com/popularity.htm | AllTheWeb, MSN | 1 | No | ||
| www.businessweb.com.au/ |
Alta Vista, Northern Light, Lycos, Teoma, HotBot | 1 | No | ||
| www.trafficzap.com/ |
AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN | 1 | No | ||
| www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ |
Google, AltaVista, MSN, HotBot, AllTheWeb, and Lycos | 1 | No | By way of comparison it shows the ranking of your site against those of 20 of sites of increasing popularity. | |
| www.sitesolutions.com/ |
HotBot, Lycos, Altavista, Google, MSN | 1 | No | ||
| http://watson.addy.com | AltaVista | 1 | No | Provides other checks for a web page. Link popularity is not its main focus. | |
| www.linkgnome.com | Altavista, Infoseek/Go, HotBot, Google | 1 | No | Provide a paid service that includes more search engines. | |
| www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml | Google, Altavista, MSN, HotBot, AllTheWeb | 1 | No | ||
| www.absolute-protect.com/populari.htm | Altavista, Excite, Google, Goto, Lycos, Northernlight, Yahoo | 1 | No |  Messy -
opens a separate window for each search engine, displaying search
results not number of links. |
|
| www.submitcorner.com/ ( |
AltaVista, FAST, Google, Infoseek, Lycos, MSN | 1 | No |
Suspect results. Service erroneously reported 0 links for a known
site on all engines (24.Nov.02 and rechecked 20.Jan.03). |
|
| www.3-g.com/link-popularity-checker.htm
( |
AltaVista, InfoSeek, HotBot | 1 | No |
Only appears to allow a link check on one search engine at a time
and service did not work when last checked (24.Nov.02 and rechecked
20.Jan.03). |
|
In addition to the above some sites offer software that performs a very similar function. The above list is intentionally restricted to those sites offering an on-line indication of site ranking and does not include downloadable software solutions.
What can be a little disconcerting is that these resources can return different results for a given page for the same search engine. Sometimes this can be explained away by one service requesting links to the specific page whereas another might be for any pages belonging to your website. It may also be that they use different regional versions of the same search engine.
The only way to improve your link popularity (i.e. the number of inbound links to your site from other people's sites) is to get other sites to link to you. Ideas to consider:
If you know of any other popularity or ranking sites that you would like to see listed on this page then please e-mail feedback@cryer.co.uk.
© Copyright 2004-2008, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved.