Wanna see how you compare?

Here’s a quick list of the most trusted ranking services I know of. These site aren’t designed to give you comprehensive statistics, just an overview of your site’s comparative rankings. I will do a follow up post shortly with some recommended stat tracking sites and services.

Ranking providers

Note: this list isn’t exhaustive, but only a list of easy to use and free ranking providers. I believe it represents the major players, and should provide you with more than enough information on your comparative rankings.

Alexa.com

Alexa.com has been around since 1996 and is the industry recognized standard in website ranking. They are to the web as Nielsen is to TV, and they have a similar drawback. Alexa can only track users that have the Alexa toolbar installed in their web browsers (Nielsen uses TV set top boxes). They then estimate the data. For example; they estimate one out of twenty internet users have their toolbar installed, your site receives 1000 visits in a day from Alexa toolbar users, they would then give you a total of 20,000 visits that day. This can cause skewed results and isn’t 100% accurate, especially on sites with low traffic. I have heard you can overcome this bias by installing an Alexa widget on your site (like the traffic graph on my right sidebar), although I was unable confirm this on Alexa’s site. If you’d like to learn more about how Alexa works please visit their FAQ page. Additionally you can see information on their history here, and info on the technology they use here.

TysBlog.com sponsors an Alexa toolbar, so if you don’t have it installed yet I invite you to install the TysBLog.com Alexa Toolbar now!

ExactRank.com

ExactRank.com is new player in the ranking game, and an up-and-comer to watch out for. ExactRank started out as a project of a polish developer by the name of Kamil Kwiecień. It was launched in it’s current Alpha state on January 2nd of this year. In March Joe Colburn from joetech.com come on board as a managing partner. In an email I received from Joe he stated their development plans are aggressive, and by Q3 of this year they plan on releasing the official Beta version of ExactRank.com. In the email from Joe he stated:

Currently, ExactRank is a simple idea with a simple goal. We want to provide an accurate and useful ranking system for the World Wide Web where others either used to work but are now failing or have fallen short from the beginning. As is often the case with development, the idea was derived from a true need in the marketplace. Google’s Page Rank is too vague and is constantly changing because it is too easily manipulated. Alexa has often been considered to provide rankings that are not truly representative of a site’s real value and are also vague in that they encompass a domain as a whole and do not account for individual pages. Compete.com offers some nice analytics, but still fails to deliver detailed page value for individual pages. ExactRank is designed to answer these shortfalls with a more complete ranking system.

Additionally, Joe informed me they’re experiencing incredible growth and are in the process of working on some great features that we should expect to see sometime in the very near future. I think this maybe the ranking system to keep you eyes on in the time to come. Based on the info I have, I have faith Joe and Kamil will produce a system that’s poised to be all encompassing. It just may become the standard in comparative rankings, site statistics, and overall analytics.

Compete.com

Compete.com was founded in 2000 by Bill Gross, the founder of GoTo.com (GoTo.com soon became Overture.com, Overture.com was acquired by Yahoo and is also the basis for Google’s web altering AdSense PayPerClick advertising program). Compete.com works similarly to Alexa in that they track data via an installed browser toolbar (2 million+ users), however they also use opt-in panels, and info from ISPs. You can learn more at Compete’s FAQ page.

Quantcast.com

Like ExactRank, Quantcast.com collects their data via a piece of java script installed on the website to be tracked. In addition to the installed java script they collect data via advertising networks and ISP’s. While Quantcast is focused on maintaining data for US based surfers and doesn’t focus on the entire world’s surfing trends, their database is impressive with over 20 millions websites worldwide tracked (the most of any I believe). You can learn more on their what is Quantcast page and on their FAQ page.

IzeaRanks.com

IzeaRanks.com is part of the Izea group of services and is geared 100% toward bloggers. Like quantcast and exactrank, your data is collected via a piece of java script installed on your blog. IzeaRanks is new, and I couldn’t find any info on their site with thier history. According to DNScoop.com their URL was registered less than 6 months ago. As I do have their java code installed on this blog and rank between the top 190-350 blogs in their network (depending on the day), I’m pretty sure their user base is still in it’s infancy. I do, however think you should keep you eyes peeled on them, they have potential (they are after all, part of a huge organization). You can learn more on their FAQ page

That’s about wraps it up. If you know of a major ranking service I missed please feel free to leave a comment below and share it with my readers!

Stumble