15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity
As a web designer or developer building a site, it’s helpful to first scout similar websites (i.e. the competition) to help you make design and development decisions. Knowing what websites work and which ones tank can give you insights and inspiration on what design elements, website features, and website content is effective.
To help you in your analysis, here are 15 top-notch, free, and simple web tools to help you learn more about a particular website.
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
Site explorer allows you to inspect certain aspects of a URL. The "Inlinks" feature shows you details about web pages that link back to the particular URL you are exploring. Site Explorer gives you some insights on how popular a website is based on how many web pages are linking to it.
2. Compete
Compete is a web-based analytics tools that allows you to compare the traffic statistics and trends of up to three websites. It gives you an estimate of how many unique visitors and page impressions a website gets and how fast a website is growing in popularity (called Growth Velocity).
3. Quantcast
Quantcast is another popular site traffic measuring tool. Quantcast allows publishers to "Quantify" their website – a process in which you place a script in your web pages so that they can measure your traffic statistics directly. With that said – sites that aren’t quantified may not have accurate/complete data and many people aren’t comfortable about placing third-party scripts on their websites.
4. Alexa
Started in 1996, Alexa is the most popular traffic ranking service today. It tracks traffic statistics of websites and provides a numerical rank based on the data that they collect. You can find a website’s Page Views and Reach (the % of internet users that have visited the website).
5. Feed Compare
An effective way to determine a website’s popularity is by tracking its RSS feed subscriber trends. If a website uses FeedBurner – the leading provider of RSS feeds services – you can use Feed Compare to see trends in subscribership from websites and compare growth/decline of subscribers for up to 4 feeds at one time.
6. popuri.us
popuri.us is a tool that can help determine how popular a URL is based on web services and statistics such as Alexa, Technorati, Delicious bookmarks, number of subscribers, and more. It’s a one page tool that gives you a quick overview of how popular a website is. popuri.us even gives you the option to post a widget on your site to display your popularity.
7. socialmeter
socialmeter is a web tool that scans how popular a web page is throughout major social websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious. It gives you a "socialmeter score" which is currently just a summation of the results found (useful for comparing social media website popularity of different websites).
8. TweetVolume
Another way of monitoring a website’s popularity is to see if people on Twitter are talking about it. TweetVolume allows you to search key words and phrases (i.e. – a website’s name, URL, author name, etc.) to see how many tweets have mentioned your search terms.
9. Quarkbase
Quarkbase is a comprehensive web tool that presents a myriad of information about a website. Quarkbase has a "Social Popularity" tab that shows you information about a website’s popularity among social media sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Delicious.
10. BlogPulse Profiles
If you’re interested in finding data about a specific blog or blogger, The BlogPulse Profiles tool is a simple web application that provides a blog’s rank, how often it’s cited in other blogs, and other information such as how many posts are published each month and blogs that are similar to it.
11. Technorati Blogging Central
Technorati is the leading blog search engine. Technorati’s Blogger Central allows you to see the ranks of a particular blog to gauge its popularity among the 128 million+ blogs in the world. You can find the Top 100 blogs in Blogger Central. Technorati determines a blog’s rank by the number of reactions (links that go to the blog) it has.
12. Statbrain.com
Statbrain.com is a simple tool that tells you how many visitors a website receives per day.
13. Cubestat
Cubestat is another simple web tool that provides you with a host of information about a website’s popularity daily page views. What’s unique about Cubestat is that it estimates a website’s monetary value (in U.S. dollars) – the more expensive the website is, the more popular it is.
14. dnScoop
dnScoop attempts to estimate the value of a website based on factors such as links pointing to the domain, popularity of the domain, page rank, traffic, and more.
15. WebsiteOutlook
WebsiteOutlook allows you to determine a website’s popularity based on its estimated value, daily page views, and revenue.
What’s your method of measurement?
How do you measure a website’s popularity? Are there tools and web services that should be on this list? Share it with us in the comments!
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124 Comments
Danh ba web 2.0
October 10th, 2008
Great tools for me. I use Alexa and Technorati
Keep up your good work !
adelle
October 10th, 2008
Jacob, good list - I currently use quarkbase (since finding out about it last month) going to be checking out these other suggestions though.
Travis
October 11th, 2008
Great list. I think I’d add http://www.websitegrader.com/ to it as well. Handy grading and analysis tool.
Sander
October 11th, 2008
Great list of free tools. I seem to miss the digitalpoint keyword tracker tool. I’ve used it in the past a lot. Does anyone has experience with shoemoneys tools? (I know it paid)
liam
October 11th, 2008
Seriously useful tools, appreciate the effort. Thanks!
Lee
October 11th, 2008
Maybe this is for another post, but Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics really helps you determine your sites popularity with in Google Search. Considering many websites traffic is largely coming from Google Search, it can be invaluable insight to what content is working on your site and what isn’t!
RestlessVillager
October 11th, 2008
What about Google’s PageRank or http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape?
Jacob Gube
October 11th, 2008
@adelle: Quarkbase is one of the most informative, all-in-one remote analytics tools I could find, it’s great indeed.
@Travis: Good call on Website Grader.
@Lee: Those are wonderful tools, but they don’t fit within the scope of this article. I wanted to include tools that can check any website, not just your own. But I do use both of those tools for Six Revisions - and thanks for the reminder!
efimor
October 11th, 2008
Jacob,
Good stuff as usual. it is pleasure to read your posts
eric
October 11th, 2008
Here’s a good alternative UI for exploring inlink data from Site Explorer: http://ericmiraglia.com/inlink/?url=http://sixrevisions.com/ -eric
Rahul
October 11th, 2008
Gosh I didn’t have any idea that there were these many site for monitoring website’s popularity. I’d been using mostly alexa and then technorati.
Thanks for this article. I must most, if not all of these to monitor my sites. Cheers.
Vasileios Pasparas
October 11th, 2008
very nice article and tools as well. keep on the good work :-)
Richard
October 11th, 2008
I use Reinvigorate. Awesome tool. Also check out their ‘Snoop’ feature. (http://reinvigorate.net)
Terry
October 11th, 2008
Woopra is an excellent piece of kit for Wordpress sites. So much info it’s unreal…
Designer
October 11th, 2008
thanks a lot guys
Torley
October 11th, 2008
Sweet, elegant compilation. Gonna put ‘em to use. Had no idea about some of these before — thx Jacob!
Howard A Brown
October 11th, 2008
Jacob, thanks so very much!
Perhaps it was apparent and I missed it, or perhaps you did touch on it and I also missed that.
But is there significance to the order in which the sites are listed? Should we infer, for example, there’s something valuable in the fact # 2 = Compete and # 3 = Quantcast?
What I really love about Quantcast is the easy access to demographic data - gender, race/ethnic group, household income, education level, etc - about real visitors to my sites and to my competitors’.
Again, thanks.
Best regards,
Howard A Brown MBA
http://contentdesk.com/cmd.php?af=735802
Work Post
October 11th, 2008
Thanks. I was looking for monitoring services this evening… and I didn’t know about some of these.
subcorpus
October 11th, 2008
great post …
i was like opening most mentioned services on a background tab as i was reading the article …
appreciated …
Eric Norton
October 11th, 2008
Really nice list of sites. I’ve used a few of them in the past. Feed Compare being one of my personal favorites from the list. Can’t wait to try out some of the other tools though.
jcardinal
October 11th, 2008
Google Analytics is still one of the best in my opinion. You can combine it with Adsense to leverage Google’s powerful tools.
Jacob Gube
October 12th, 2008
@Richard: Reinvigorate is an awesome tool. I’ve been meaning to try it for a while now, I’ll check it out sometime this weekend.
@Terry: Woopra sounds cool - but I intended this list to contain tools that are free and that can check a website other than your own. That’s why I didn’t include Google Analytics - not because it’s not great (it is, I use it here on Six Revisions) - but because only the site admins can see the data. I should have made that clearer.
@Howard A Brown: I don’t intentionally rank each tool by number. If you can see the progression of the list, I try to group similar tools together (i.e. starting with traffic statistics tools, and at the end, tools that estimate the value of a site). But to answer the Quantcast vs. Compete question, I like Compete much better. Without “Quantifying” your site with Quantcast, you don’t get very accurate results; and I’m not comfortable sharing traffic statistics to third-party companies that publish it publicly - it’s not fair to your privacy (the readers) and mine.
Thanks for the wonderful comments and sharing your own favorite tools. Keep ‘em coming!
Jacob Gube
October 12th, 2008
@eric: Great tool! Well done. If anyone’s looking for an improvement to Yahoo! Site Explorer, check out eric’s Page Inlink Analyzer tool that uses Yahoo!’s
Search API (or do they call it BOSS now?)Site Explorer Inbound Links API and Delicious API to provide you with more information on Inlinks in tabular format.Mike Huang
October 12th, 2008
Thanks for these great sites :)
-Mike
Andrei Buiu
October 12th, 2008
Great tools. Thanks for sharing.
Ryan G
October 12th, 2008
Great work, thanks.
Also, as Travis mentioned, I use websitegrader too.
gre
October 12th, 2008
according to mypagerank.net my site have pr 1 only, but when checked with popuri.us they say i have pr 4.
which one is correct?
Jacob Gube
October 12th, 2008
@gre: I tried another application to check your page rank (it’s called Google PageRank Checker and it also said 4.
Ron
October 12th, 2008
Hey,
This is really great post, a lot of nice stuff.
Quarkbase is really nice, gives full details (but I think it need some updates when new content get in).
Cubestat is very very cute, all info at 1 place including evaluation of my blog :D
Thanks again!
Greg B.
October 13th, 2008
@Jacob, http://attentionmeter.com is another one. Lets one compare compete, alexa, quantcast, etc charts in one place vs. wasting time hopping around.
Babak Ahadi
October 14th, 2008
Hi
I Think Alexa Is The Best Solution!!!
countzeero
October 14th, 2008
Great Article, with excellent resources, popularity (or rather lack of it) can be painful but the insights will help improve traffic and popularity. Bookmarking this one.
rio2000
October 14th, 2008
very nice tool
i use alexa for my blog
rahim
October 16th, 2008
Nice Information! thanks a lot
fav8r
October 17th, 2008
Cool list !!! i will try it.
Geek-News.Net
October 22nd, 2008
That’s a pretty handy list of sites, not only for keeping track of your own sites but checking out some of the competition or just checking out your favorites.
I’ve used a few of them before but you’ve added a few I had never heard of. I’ll definitely be adding them to my arsenal.
Kristina
October 24th, 2008
Thanks so much for the great list. Most of them I haven’t heard about.
I use Semonics (http://semonics.com) to get my web popularity reports.
Helena G
October 26th, 2008
Just found this free web seo tool well defined and easy to work around.Especially for online monitoring.
http://www.webseomasters.com/
The web statistics tool (very powerfull) is an intresting tool that helped me a lot.
Diseño Web
October 29th, 2008
Mmm. I think that Alexa is a very bad reference for Web Site Popularity, because the Alexa ranking is made from the visits that have her toolbar: Webmasters, SEO, etc, but that is not a real data.
Talen
November 2nd, 2008
Alexa has proven to be the absolute worst metric for any website outside of their top 100.
Michael
November 2nd, 2008
Thanks for the list of tools. These are pretty awesome!
Kurt Avish
November 3rd, 2008
Wonderful list. Thanks for sharing.
Angel Cuala
November 3rd, 2008
I this list is awesome. I am glad I found it through Daily Blog Tips. However, I can’t believe Statbrain gave results that my blog has already 2,500 visits a day, while Daily Blog Tips has only 3,000 visits a day.
I am quite sure the data is incorrect, at least for my blog. I think my blog haven’t reach even 300 visits on daily average.
Can you please comment on this?
Thanks!
eGruve.com
November 3rd, 2008
Awesome tools , thanks for sharing and love the tips keep them coming
Young
November 4th, 2008
Very good, will translate it into Chinese.
Shailendra Vijayvergia
November 5th, 2008
Hi,
It’s really good list of tools. And good part is even comments made by other contributors also have suggested good links.
A suggestion, can article be updated with new suggested tools/links, so people not need to dig all comments to find additional one.
But once again, thanks a lot for this good list.
Jason Miller
November 5th, 2008
I’m investigating a service/company called Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com). From what I understand their tool is targeted specifically to PR firms (or large multi-unit company).
~ jason
Valeria | TimelessLessons
November 6th, 2008
Seriously useful tools, I really appreciate the effort. Might be to early for me to use them on my websites, but thank you…
visiblenet
November 13th, 2008
This is a fantastic list. Wasn’t aware of many of these tools before now. Certainly will bookmark for later review. We recently developed our own tool for in-house use and thought your readers may be interested in trying it out. It is offered free on our website. We encourage feedback and suggestions, so let us know if there’s something you think could be improved. Here’s the website statistics tool location…
http://www.visible.net/tools/statistics/
Rowen
November 16th, 2008
Thanks thats a help
Schlecter
December 4th, 2008
I loved WebsiteOutlook, very accurate with my site
Camtu Pham
January 4th, 2009
Great summary. Thanks!
Most tools generate good & accurate results except statbrain.com
At first, I was excited to see the $ value from WebsiteOutlook. However, considering the effort & years to build the sites - the amount is indeed very small. Great effort! Thnaks for the list
Warm regards
Camtu
Jose
January 31st, 2009
Thanks for sharing this info. To be honest some of these tools are new to me (as popuri.us, socialmeter and Quarkbase). Thanks again ;)
CSD
February 2nd, 2009
Fantastic list, very helpful to have on file.
Woogley
February 26th, 2009
guys, this is a big help for me. Thanks! Now i don’t need to search more tools to use to compare the rankings and the output of my site to my competitors.
Ronnie Roper
March 7th, 2009
Awesome list. Thank you. I am checking out all the suggestions. I love new tools.
Techie
March 7th, 2009
lots of great tools..i’ve used technorati and alexa only…it should help me a lot..thanks..
DatasheetPro
April 22nd, 2009
I found a couple of sites like websiteoutlook (http://www.cubestat.com and http://www.valuatemysite.com). They seem to both have good results.
Tamuir
May 15th, 2009
Very nice article, i use quantcast, google analytics.
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