15 Tools for Monitoring a Website’s Popularity

October 10th, 2008 by Jacob Gube | 170 Comments | Stumble It! Delicious

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!

170 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.

SigBroker

July 3rd, 2009

I hadn’t seen most of these monitoring and performance tools but some of them are really cool, especially Cubestat and Website Outlook. Thanks !

Daled

August 12th, 2009

Very useful, Thanks a lot.

Luis

August 17th, 2009

Tks. I didnt know socialmeter. I guess I have some websites to join. :)

Adam Coburn

August 18th, 2009

This is a great list. Don’t forget about the RhinoSEO Website Grader. http://grader.rhinoseo.com/ It offers the similar grading as hubspot but looks at other factors too like sitemaps

Finder

August 19th, 2009

Great list! I am using all of them and some more like WebRanker (I added link in signature)

Aline S

September 8th, 2009

I use http://www.estimix.com to calculate how much traffic a
website has. It seems to provide much better traffic information and competitive analysis for free.

Umang Amin

September 11th, 2009

Nice post ..:)

Whoop

September 13th, 2009

Also I recommend to check website traffic and analyze on SurCentro.com

They are great alternative for CubeStat and Statbrain

SlingBlade

September 13th, 2009

I’m not sure if anyone else mentioned it, but there is also http://www.urlappraisal.net. It’s pretty similar to dn scoop, for helping you calculate what your domain name is worth via a bunch of different metrics. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I think it’s pretty descent…

Bronwen

September 15th, 2009

Very informative even if I have now worked out that my website is worth less than I thought :-)

prasad

September 27th, 2009

good page i check my website named http://www.tendertiger.com
and found good rank

Aline S

October 5th, 2009

You can also try http://www.estimix.com – a free tool that provides a nice summary of the website performance.The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.

website builder

October 5th, 2009

Thank you. I knew about a few of these already but it always helps to have some extra resources to refer back to.

John

October 8th, 2009

Good!

John

October 8th, 2009

I’m using this service to monitor my website’s rank – http://monitor.mazecore.com . They provide position and uptime monitoring with alerts, but rank monitoring on free account is enough for me. I recommend this service with free tariff

John

October 10th, 2009

I’m using this service to monitor my website’s position – http://monitor.mazecore.com . They provide rank and uptime monitoring with alerts, but position monitoring on free account is enough for me. I recommend this service with free tariff for your website.

Funcinema

October 10th, 2009

Thanks!! Very usefuul tools for website owners…

John

October 12th, 2009

Nice post! but you fogot to add free website monitoring – http://monitor.mazecore.com

Scott

October 12th, 2009

Nice post! Try this position, rank and website uptime monitoring service – http://monitor.mazecore.com

Altax

October 15th, 2009

That is really a great list. Very informative and useful post. Here is also a tool for free website monitoring service http://100pulse.com . Thanks for the post.

Rob

October 23rd, 2009

Hi Guys, there is another website worth valuator out there called Web Worth – Web Worth can estimate a web sites worth or value, daily ads revenue, daily page views, back links and directory listing – http://www.webworth.info/ looks like the figures are from traffic stats.

Ladybird

October 28th, 2009

Hi! http://www.estimix.com is a great site valuation tool that seems to generate very accurate information.

Murali Bala

November 2nd, 2009

Thank you for blogging this excellent list. I also have been pretty impressed by http://www.websitegrader.com/

geetha

November 4th, 2009

Its a great summary… Good.. Any web developers should be aware of these websites…

Tozlu Sayfa

December 2nd, 2009

Good. Very informative even if I have now worked out that my website

cografya

December 4th, 2009

Thanks. I was looking for monitoring services this evening… and I didn’t know about some of these.

dizi

December 4th, 2009

Woopra is an excellent piece of kit for Wordpress sites. So much info it’s unreal

kpss sınavı

December 9th, 2009

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.