How to Judge Another Site’s Importance
There are a couple of ways you can get a quick feel for a web site and how important it is. If you want to compete in the search engines with a competitor, if you’re deciding whether to try and get backlinks from a particular site, or you want to get a feel for how well another company is doing in general on the internet so you know whether to follow their lead or not, here’s how to find out.
Google Pagerank
Google gives every page it finds a “Pagerank”. It will rate a web page, on a scale of 0~10, by how important it thinks the page is. The home page of a site will generally have the highest rank, and then each page inside the site will get it’s own rank as well.
The rank Google gives a particular page is decided by so many factors and is so vague that it’s almost useless for gathering any specific data, but it’s great for just taking a quick glance at a site.
Here’s what the Google Toolbar looks like (combination pagerank and search bar). You can download it here: Google Toolbar
When you go to a web site, glance briefly at it’s page rank for a quick idea of how important Google thinks the site is. Here’s generally what you can tell from pagerank:
0 — Google doesn’t think the site is very important. It doesn’t get much traffic or doesn’t have much useful information on it.
1~2 — Google has noticed this web site and thinks it is worthy of some recognition
3~4 — Google gives this web site a fair amount of authority and sees it as a decent source of information
5~6 — This site is an established source of quality information
7~8 — Google says this site is a major player
9~10 — These rankings are reserved for the big dogs
Competitive Analysis:
I can only give you suggestions in the broadest terms, but generally a site that has a rank of 3 or better is a competitor worth looking at. They’ve probably been around for a little while and have done something right in terms of content and optimization to earn their rank. I wouldn’t take any cues from someone 2 and down. They may just be a new site (and pagerank take s little time to build up), but if they’ve been around for a couple years then chances are they don’t know much about internet marketing and you don’t want to duplicate what they’re doing.
Search Engine Optimization:
Generally speaking, if you want to take on a competitor in the search engines a pagerank of 0~1 is not hard to beat. 2~3 will take a bit of effort. 4~6 will take a good bit of work and some major time commitment. I wouldn’t bother competing against a site ranked 7~10 unless you’re already a good-sized company with someone dedicated to SEO.
Backlinks:
Pagerank is not a bad way to gauge where you should focus your backlink attention. If a site’s home page has 0 pagerank then there’s not much point to getting a link from them. It might help a little. Pagerank 1~2 might be helpful if there’s a shortage of higher ranking pages. Anything 3 and up is usually a good place to get backlinks from to help your own rank and bring in some traffic as well.
Alexa
Alexa is a web site rating system introduced by Amazon.com in 2005. They decided to give a rank to every site on the internet based strictly on how many people visit that web site. If you have the Alexa toolbar loaded on your browser you can see any web site’s Alexa rank. Having the toolbar installed is also how you cast your own vote–if you visit a site while the toolbar is active, that site gets a vote and moves up in the rankings.
Here’s what the Alexa Toolbar looks like in the bottom corner of my screen. Download it here: Alexa Toolbar
The Alexa rank number is a comparison of one web site to every other web site in existence. In general here’s what you can tell by an Alexa ranking:
> #1,000,000 — DOA
#500,000~#1,000,000 — On the radar
#100,000~#500,000 — Not a major player, but worth some recognition
#10,000~#100,000 — Getting some really good traffic…watch these sites
#1.000~#10,000 — These guys are the professionals
< #1,000 -- Don't try beating them...see if you can join them
Competitive Analysis:
This is only a look at how many people with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited a particular site. Nothing more. Some industries are prone to high traffic and some aren’t.
Having said that, breaking into the top 100,000 takes some effort and they’re doing something right. If a competitor is over 1,000,000 they hardly have a pulse. If they’re in the top 10,000 you’ll want to study up on what they’re doing and how they’re getting their traffic.
Search Engine Optimization:
The Alexa rating doesn’t have any bearing on SEO. A site could have a great Alexa rating and still be doing everything wrong in regards to search engines, and vice versa.
Backlinks:
For backlinks, the better the Alexa ranking the more traffic you’ll get from having a link on their page. One thing to realize is that Alexa ranks an entire site, not individual pages like Google’s pagerank. This means a site might have a great Alexa rating and you think you’ll get a lot of traffic if they link to you, but if they put your link on some backwater page that nobody ever sees it won’t do you much good for traffic. It will probably still help you in the search engine rankings a bit though.
Notes:
1) These toolbars may clutter up your screen with other stats and buttons, but you can right-click on them and disable whatever features you don’t want.
2) The guidelines above are just general thoughts. It’s possible, for example, that every one of your competitors has a “1,000,000+” Alexa rating–that just means that compared to the rest of the internet they aren’t looked at as much. There still could be very stiff competition going on between them. You’ll want to look at a dozen or so competitors or potential allies to get a feel for who to pay attention to.
3) There is no defined correlation between pagerank and Alexa rank. My old web design site has a pagerank of 2 and is #1,898,141 in Alexa. This is because it has been around for a while and has some decent content on the site but nobody visit’s it anymore.
In contrast, InternetMarketingForBusinessOwners.com has a pagerank of 0 but an Alexa rank of #438,633 (as of this writing). This site may never get a pagerank above a 2 or 3 because all the content is protected by passwords so Google can’t read it, and it’s only a month old so the Alexa rating will jump all over the place for a while (that, and a lot of my traffic is coming in through the separate domain name “increasemywebsitetraffic.com” which has it’s own Alexa rating of #734,224–combine the two and I’d be doing better. Oh well…).
Update: after a couple months both sites mentioned above are under 100,000 on Alexa. That’s not bad at all–roughly 40,000 visitors a month. If you’d like to see exactly how I generate that kind of traffic, check out my mentoring program and other site resources where you can see behind the scenes exactly how I run my online businesses.
The overall idea here is that pagerank and Alexa ratings are a quick way to get a feel for where a web site is at. So take a peek at them and decide your next move!
Quick update
Sometimes I type in a web address just to see what’s there. I typed in “FireYourBoss.com” just for the heck of it and found a web site that looks pretty respectable. I thought maybe I’d explore it a bit and contact the owner to talk about placing the IMFBO.com web site on there as a way of helping people learn internet marketing skills that would help them fire their boss.
Then I saw the Alexa rating: #4,349,818! Nobody visits this site! It’s got less traffic than my web design site has (and I haven’t touched my web design site in nearly two years). Just placing a link to FireYourBoss.com in the previous paragraph will do wonders for it’s rating from the few curious people who click on it.
If I got IMFBO.com on the home page of FireYourBoss.com, it would do me absolutely no good whatsoever. Thank you Alexa!
Other popular Competitive Analysis tutorials:
- How to Raid Your Competitor’s Web Site for Secret Information
- How to Get to Prospect Before Your Competitors Do
- What Key Words are your Competitors Using?