Which tools do you use to find out about and compare websites?

[MichaelCorfman]

There are a variety of free metrics and tools that can be used to find out lots of information about any website (whether or not you own it).

Some examples include:

Popularity as measured by Alexa (www.Alexa.com)
Popularity as measured by Compete (www.Compete.com)
Popularity as measured by Quantcast (www.Quantcast.com)
Inbound Links (most search engines can provide this and Alexa does too).
Google Page Rank (Google toolbar)
Site history from the wayback machine (www.archive.org)
Domain registration information (whois services like www.networksolutions.com/whois/)
Possible copyright violations (www.copyscape.com)

Which of these tools have you used? What do you think of them? And what other tools do you think are worth sharing with your fellow webmasters?

Michael

[Nandakishore]

Apart from Copyscape, I also use 'Similar Page Checker' (http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) which compares the contents of 2 urls.

I also used in the past quite frequently the 'Sitening Seo web analyzer' which brings some useful reports about content, links etc. of URLs you define. This used to be free. Now this has been taken over by 'Raven SEO Tools' (http://raven-seo-tools.com/). Now it costs $20/monthly, so I don't use it anymore.

[ioc]

I use http://www.whois.org to look into whois information.

[TheGooner]

I tend to look at the Alexa ranking to be in the top 100,000.

Quantcast is interesting - but they don't have data on many of the smaller sites, while compete is only interested in US traffic - and that's not really a demographic we chase too hard (given current legislative environment)

Inbound links and Google page rank are not relevant to me at all.

[Chips]

I look at Alexa, whois and like playing with the wayback machine and always have Google PR toolbar one. I really have just started studying other sites to see what is "clicking" with them. Fighting for PR and love to see high ranking sites and what appears to work for them.

Hope to learn more in Spain.

[Nandakishore]

I also use Smart PageRank (http://www.smartpagerank.com), which was recommended by someone in this forum. It is a very practical tool. I have installed it as Firefox Smart Toolbar. You can see for any url the google PR, age of the site, the Whois entry, backlinks with analysis, and a value of the site calculated using factors like PageRank, traffic, backlinks, age of the domain, directory listings etc.

[aksana]

Always look at Alexa, Google PR, whois and recently started looking at the archieve tool

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I've used xxx.seodigger.com to see what keywords are being targeted by a particular website. I tried with my own websites and it's only partially accurate.

[Nandakishore]

I've used xxx.seodigger.com to see what keywords are being targeted by a particular website. I tried with my own websites and it's only partially accurate.

Same here. A couple of keywords which have been registered by the google webmasters tool were not identified by seodigger. But I will use it for a while and see the results.