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):
- Compare your visitor numbers with other sites (click popularity)
- Discover who is linking to you (link popularity)
- How to improve your link popularity
- Other Resources
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.
Compare your visitor numbers 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.
Discover who is linking to you
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.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/link-popularity.html |
Google, Yahoo, Live, AllTheWeb and AltaVista. | 3 | Yes | By way of comparison it shows the ranking of your site against those of 20 of sites of increasing popularity. |
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.leak.info | 1 | No | Returns in-bound links found with a Google PR of 4 or more, together with their pagerank. | |
| www.addme.com/popularity.htm | Ask, Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb and AltaVista. | 1 | No | |
| http://watson.addy.com | ? | 1 | No | Provides other checks for a web page. Link popularity is not its main focus and you have to explicitly select this. |
| www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/link-popularity/ | Google, Yahoo and Bing | 1 | No | Results open in a pop-up window. |
| www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml | Google, Altavista, MSN, AllTheWeb and Yahoo | 1 | No | Results not very reliable. |
| www.iconinteractive.com/tools/pop/ | AllTheWeb, Bloglines, AltaVista, Google, HotBot, MSN and Yahoo. | 1 | No | Not very reliable. |
| www.linkpopularity.com | Google, MSN, Yahoo | 1 | Yes | This site provides links to Google, MSN and Yahoo which will give you the popularity information, but the results are not correlated on this site. |
| www.trafficzap.com/linkpopularity.php | Google, MSN, Yahoo | 1 | No | Results not very reliable. |
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.
How to improve your link popularity
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. Some ideas to consider:
- Contact similar sites and ask if they would be willing to exchange links with you - you add a link to them in return for them adding a link to your site.
- If there are any relevant web directories then submit your site to them. One popular directory is the Open Directory Project - www.dmoz.org.
- Some sites sell links - but be aware that Google is disapproves of this and it may end up hurting your rankings.
- Some sites specialise in finding sites to exchange links with.
Other Resources
If you are interested in creasing the popularity of your webiste then you are likely to find the following resources useful:
- The SEO tip www.cryer.co.uk/resources/seo/seo_tip_8.htm as it covers getting inbound links and more.
A translation of this article is available in Bulgarian here.
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.