How popular is your site?
Published on: July 8, 2004 by Paul Boag
Are you interested in knowing how popular your site is compared to your competition? Then here are two automated tools which will help you get a good indication.
How many people link to your site and who those people are can dramatically effect your search engine position. However it also gives you a good indication of how popular your site is. linkpopulaity.com allows you to search on a web site address and see who links to that address. This allows you to gauge just how popular your site is compared to your competition.
Alexa web search
An even more powerful tool for judging the popularity of your site is Alexa.com. As with linkpopularity.com Alexa allows you to search on a web site address. However Alexa will return a ranking for your site so you can see exactly how popular it is. For example the most popular web site would rank number one while a new site like boagworld would rank in the millions. The ranking is based on two factors:
- Your reach - Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com.
- Your page views - Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once.
Alexa also gives you a breakdown of these two factors so you can see how well you are performing on each. Finally it also gives you an indication of whether your ranking is moving upward or downwards. One word of warning however; because page views are based on users that have the Alexa toolbar the results can be some what distorted.
