Blog ratings!
You know there’s nothing like having a blog to instill a little obsession in a guy. There’s no shortage of stats, right now my three main stats are FeedBurner both for my feed stats as well as a quick view into my daily stats - it tends to be more current than Google Analytics. GA is the main workhorse of stats (although I liked the previous version better) and Enquisite which gives me some very detailed information into how and what people are reaching via the various and sundry search engines. All three are really great and thankfully align pretty well in the numbers as far as they overlap.
Beyond that there’s all kinds of random numbers I look at for giggles, like my Technorati rating and my Alexa rating. There’s not too much help seeing those numbers can do, but you know… they’re numbers… and you can look at them. Now there’s a new crop of numbers coming up - these services purport to give your blog a rating by combining a bunch of these other numbers into some kind of holistic score.
The first one I came across was Blog Juice, this one takes your Alexa rank, Tehcnorati rank, Technorati links and Bloglines subscriptions and mixes that all up and comes out with a rating from 1-10. You can see my sad score to the right there.
It’s kind of silly, because it gives Alexa a lot of weight and Alexa as we all know is quite broken, even more so for sites on the less trafficked part of the scale. Also, it double weights Technorati since it looks at the rating as well as the links in T. I don’t know why they didn’t use inbound links from Google instead. But you know, it’s something and it gets at ranking things, which is always fun to look at.
The other one I just came across was Website Grader. This one’s all fancy pants and takes a site, some optional keywords and some optional competitors. It then pulls all sorts of information from all sorts of sources, it pulls from Google, Technorati, delicous, Alexa, Yahoo, it actually analyzes the structure of your web pages - it swirls those all around and gives you a grade from 1 to 100 and also breaks down each element that it pulls to give you a little summary of how you did. I received the dubiously high grade of 87 out of 100, though.
If you have a website and are bored they’re worth a few minutes to check out, but I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock into those numbers. :)
August 29th, 2007 at 12:42 am
You aren’t using Quantcast? Gotta get you some Quantcast!
August 29th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Huh, I’ll give it a shot. It’s not quantified info that it has on my site is pretty wrong. Jerks. Ah well, I’ll throw another beacon on the pile. Thanks for the 411.
August 29th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Thanks for the review, I’m glad you are enjoying the Enquisite stats. Like many others, you’ve found that our offering is complimentary to Google Analytics. Most of our users also use Google / Omniture / WebTrends; they add our offering as it has features and offers information which you can’t get elsewhere.
Thanks again, we’ve got lots more to come!
Richard
Enquisite